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at some point, I'll have to try a linux gps map and see if its as good as the commercial ones. would be nice to have a fully open source gps system in my car

There is GpsDrive and navit for navigation engines and UIs. I have played around with navit some on a raspberry pi and you can load maps from Open Street Map into it. I would suggest checking OSM for some locations you are familiar with to get a better feel for the accuracy of open source maps. In my experience it depends on the the users in a given are, if they are like myself they will map out almost everything they can, if there aren't many users or ones who aren't obsessive things might not be as up to date.

because there are few gps navigation apps for linux.

One of my friends has DashDAQ GPS Navigation, and then there is that company called TomTom.

If you are talking about the Open Source options, http://gpsdrive.de/ and tangoGPS for two. Naturally none of the above does me any good as I don't have a GPS receiver, but as I already have a computer in the trunk running Linux.

* Linux/Mac OSX:: GpsDrive
* Windows:: gpsVP

try GpsDrive + OpenStreetMaps on an automotive MiniITX kit. It'll fit into a stereo bay and draw about 20 watts, and is hackable to your heart's content.

And when you buy a PC it comes with Windows so you don't need to by install Linux, Firefox....
I do tend to agree with you but I would love to build my own car nav system and see if I could do better than what the car companies are doing.

Currently, I use GPSDrive in conjunction with Mapnik and OpenStreetMap.org on my carputer. It's more of a "you are here" system than a navigation system, but with the OSM data navigation abilities are supposedly in the works. With OSM maps it really looks nice, although I haven't used the new version with upgraded OSM and LandSat capabilities so it may be even better now.

Check out gpsdrive at http://www.gpsdrive.de/

Bluetooth is pretty nifty, but it can be hard to get the compatibility you are looking for. Indeed, I am typing this post on my laptop running Fedora Core 2 over a bluetooth connection using GPRS through a mobile phone. However, serial ports and serial cables are reliable, prevalant, and are your best shot at compatibility. A GPS connection is not going to move (relatively) much data over whatever interface you choose. Serial is easy.

I recently received a Garmin Rino 130 as a present. It's pretty nifty. It's hand-held, with a built-in digital compass along with the GPS, and it has a built-in FRS/GMRS radio. Something like 54MB of RAM for maps. There's plenty more stuff in there that I haven't even scratched yet.

I don't really have much recent experience with GPS equipment, but within 15 minutes I had it talking via its included serial cable to my laptop via NMEA protocol, and started plotting my location on freely-downloadable maps with the awesome GPSDrive software.

The process was as easy and about as seamless as I could have imagined for such stuff.

Having used both Microsoft SmartPhone and Nokia Series 60 phones (7650 and 3650) I can tell you that Microsoft offering is garbage compared to the Nokia ones... UI is more intuitive and usable. Also Bluetooth, MIDP 2.0 and Symbian OS provides (for me) a more attractive and usable environment. Plus the phone is actually a lot more stabler.

The Microsoft SDK is a more usable though than the current Nokia one, but I was able to create a GPS program for my 3650 in three days. It uses Socket's Bluetooth GPS module for location information and downloads a map from Mapblast using GPRS connection - a bit like GpsDrive and one program done for SonyEricsson P800. You cannot do that in SmartPhone (current phones for not have Bluetooth).

So for Series 60 SDK:
Forum Nokia and your Bluetooth examples and community help from:
Berlin Factor
Newlc And one more thing there are more than three million Series 60 phones out there compared to measly 80000 Microsoft SmartPhones :-).