GPS ramble
Jul 21, 2006 in General, Tech, Game, MCE
Another blogger game the Garmin a bit of a thumbs down review, which was understandable. It got me thinking a bit and thought I would ramble about GPS life in general. I have never thought much of the Garmin’s. Fugly and limited IMO.
I have been using Copilot for a couple years and found it be pretty good (on a old IPAQ). The biggest problem is when the IPAQ piece of shit battery invariable drains all the way you have to get the software to phone home for reactivation or call in manually. It’s a big pain in the ass and the shorter your time and more lost you are the more sure you can be this will happen. I wish copilot would rethink that one. The Ipaq the Achilles heal though. Getting data to the card is pretty easy, just select a bloc and download. With a 1 gig card I can stick all of CA and a good chunk of Mexico and Nevada on there. This can make parsing for locations a bit slow though. We also have a nice big screen GPS in our Toyota highlander hybrid, why it doesn’t support Bluetooth like the prius I don’t understand but other then that is has been very functional. Charise likes it a lot which in many ways is the ultimate acid test. If it had been up to her we probable not have gotten it, but she later recanted finding it very handy a couple of times.
I would buy a Tom Tom 910 today but the dam thing won’t work with the Treo 650 blue tooth for reasons I do not understand and Tom Tom refused to expand upon. Given that they sell separate software just for the Treo 650 I find this to be pretty ridiculous. The Tom Tom screens are way to small for the cost IMO but I generally feel that way about most of the GPS’s on the market. These are limited use fixed/semi mobile devices yet I can get a phone or PDA and software with the same size or even bigger screens for less money generally. Seem a bit out of whack. That being said of the current models I have spent some time with I like the Tom Tom feature set the best, I just won’t buy one until it works with my phone :p. The Pioneer z1 sounds amazing it has almost all the features I could want including the ability to learn from how you go and route along preferred ways, but it’s upwards of 2k, which is just nutty, so no go. Good size screen. blue tooth lots of extras, and some other cool features that I wish where in all devices.
I think about slapping a card in a tablet PC and duck taping it to the dash then I can have a big screen and everything else but I would surly die fiddling with it. Still I might try it with the streets and trips, the GPS support is supposed to be pretty good. At the end of the day I have played with and owned a good number of different GPS’s over the years. On long trips or driving around new areas or just for finding things they can’t be beat if you are in a pinch. I love them but have a real love hate relationship with what you get for the money these days and when they don’t work but should it can be sheer hell. I like to think it’s getting better though and pretty soon we can have GPS in everything and tied into muni wifi or whatever for traffic and other types of updates without annoying service fee’s and tying up the cel line. Ah well, a boy can dream 
My biggest irritation is there is no way to submit corrections to the base data. There are only a couple of major data providers and they all seem to share the same mistakes (I’m sure this is from taking from the same county sources). There is never any way to get it fixed. My house is a block off. My families house is two off and around a corner my office doesn’t seem to exist at all and goes into the rang of address hell (the greatest weak area where the wife usually rights it off as a useless toy). Same thing google maps, streets and trips etc. Everyone just seems sure their data is fine instead of pox ridden and won’t let the great user communities fix it, and this has been true for years and years. So in short GPS companies are not very web 2.0 yet.