[nylug-talk] OT - city wide GPS question???

[Ajai Khattri]

On Mon, 1 Jan 2007, VaibhaV Sharma wrote:

> I personally like Tomtom's UI, rich navigation options and the  
> ability to make use of the available information. However, it does  
> have its own quirks. The POI database and the maps are far from being  
> called current. Lets you find a restaurant but you cant see its  
> telephone number to be able to call it to check if it still exists.  
> The nuvi has that option.

I like the TomToms too but the nuvi is smaller and the design (fits 
into a shirt pocket) making it more portable (that curved back on the 
TomToms doesn't quite work so well in your pocket ;-)

> For car navigation, a  
> friend uses a cheap ($99) external bluetooth gps receiver with the  
> tomtom software on his Treo. Works well, but then everyone does not  
> like carrying two devices.

I did not mention in my last post that I have a Nokia 770 which has a 
Bluetooth car navigation kit available for it [1]. But what is really cool 
are two free apps that use GPS: GPSDrive [2] and Maemo Mapper [3]. 
GPSDrive is a GPS mapping app for Linux that has been ported to the 770 
which can use a Bluetooth GPS device [4]. Maemo Mapper is similar except 
it can grab GPS data and then grab the corresponding map from Google Maps 
to display.

Since there are no decent smartphones that (a) dont run Windows or PalmOS, 
and (b) have software as great as the old Psion machines, I have been 
looking to use the 770 as a PDA/surfing/ebook/mapping device. Did I 
mention the 770 runs Linux? ;-)

As you pointed out though, the downside is having to carry an extra 
device...

[1] http://tableteer.nokia.com
[2] http://gpsdrive.kraftvoll.at/
[3] http://gnuite.com:8080/nokia770/maemo-mapper/
[4] http://nokia770.com/305


-- 
Aj. (ajai at bitblit.net)