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Garmin Palm Device With GPS
Moritz writes "Garmin is introducing a PalmOS5 handheld with GPS, MP3 and 32MB of memory. That's very nice, but why is there no bluetooth? Why can't somebody just get the spec right? Other than that this seems to be a nice addition to the PalmOS lineup."
... one of these to go with my Sony/Ericsson T68, HBH30 bluetooth headset and Palm Tungsten T:
Socket Bluetooth GPS Receiver
This offers much more flexibility, and I can leave the phone in my pocket, the GPS in my bag and use two hands to navigate the maps and links on the Palm.
Now wash your hands.
I like my electronics to be seperate and small. I don't want a phone/MP3/PDA/GPS/condom dispenser. A device like that would be too big. I want a small phone, a small GPS, a small MP3 player, and a small PDA. In total they would be bigger than the all-in-one, but you could store them in different locations as well. Also, if your single unit breaks, your screwed. And there's always the fact that I don't want a PDA or GPS device. I only want a phone and an MP3 player. The only logical combination I can come up with is the phone/GPS device.
Help I'm a rock.
Garmin comes from the GPS side of this. They're not known for PDAs. I can't see where all 3 would be useful in situations where the GPS is used a lot. And the description doesn't mention water resistance. Makes any GPS useless for real world usage, IMHO.
......
As for no networking, my Garmin 76S has a 4 wire conn to my laptop. Serial, true, but plenty fast enough to load maps and routes into it's 24meg. I've never looked into it to see how that part works.I can load maps into it at the nav station and then take it up to the wheel. In the car, it's even easier. Laptop sits on an unoccupied seat and the GPS is against the windshield.
As for the 32meg, I get 4 books, nav s/w, games, etc on my 8meg Visor Edge. Plenty and it's at least somewhat water resistent. (Haven't dropped in the drink, but rain hasn't drowned it... yet) Colour screen would be nice. Reading a book on the GPS would be easier to read than the Edge, me thinks...
As for the MP3 player, I've got a stereo on the boat and in the car. When I'm walking/hiking, I like the sounds around me better. Then again, I'm not a big music-on-the-go buff.
Nice toy for somebody else, I guess. But with $589 I could get a good set of
I'm an iPod owner, and when it came out I thought that very soon there'd be a ton of PDAs ditching their 32Mb RAM and moving over to fitting the same sort of mini hard drive that the iPod has. However, none have arrived that I'm aware of. Strange, I honestly believed that would be the next step. The iPod has shown that music listening is popular, so I would have thought that there's room for a PDA which does more than just the classic contacts/calendar/task list.
Does anyone know of a PDA which is hard drive-based?
Cheers,
Ian
The problem with bluetooth is that it is extrordinairily complex. needlessly complex. The standards comittee took years to create a spec so byzantine that it takes vendors years to implement.
An alternative is coming. Cypress Semiconductors is rolling out wireless USB. In a nutshell...
- lower cost (simpler = less silicon; $3.50/unit. That is the wireless and the little CPU to run your keyboard, mouse, game controller, or interface to your larger device.)
- lower latency (low enough for FPS games. 8ms, up to 20ms with 7 devices. Human reaction time is something like 50ms.)
- higher speed (217kbps)
- standard software (everything is still USB to your computer)
Their first releases are an integrated HID controller and the upstream bridge which should be available now or very soon. It isn't clear to me if the bridge chip can be used by people making non-HID hardware devices, like PDAs, as a client interface.You can read their old press release here. There is a link to a nice PDF at the bottom of that page.
Leading unanswered questions...
- How does it get along with 802.11[bg]? They are in the same band, both frequency hop.
- Cell phone companies do not move quickly. Will they consider a cheaper alternative to bluetooth?
- Is the product on track? Their press release is from November. There is a suspicious lack of information on the Cypress site. Their projected milestone was Q1'03, so they still have time.
Me, I hope Wireless USB catches on. I'd love to make wireless USB connected balls like these to use as system status indicators. Yes it is needlessly complex, but it compensates by being oddly cool.Excellent! With current PDA calendar applications, you can tell it to remind you to do something at a particular time, whereas it'd be much more useful if it could remind you to do something in a particular place, or a combination of the two.
I'd like to be able to get it to remind me to do something 30 minutes after I've got home - it'd give me time to take my shoes off, sit down, and relax with a nice cup of tea before it starts to beep at me. It'd also be useful to be able to tell it to remind me to buy some milk when I walk past Tescos on my way home...
Day before yesterday. And it wasn't because I got "so lost". I was dividing up some property. I drew the new lines and corners on a scale topo map for the surveyor. And then he handed me a roll of orange tape, and said "okay, go mark your new corner with this, and could you also hang some where that new line crosses the creek?" Yeah, that caught me by surprise!
So, yeah, before too much longer I was 1/4 km into the woods, in a place I'd never been before, two hours before sunset, in near-freezing weather. I got to within 10 feet of the point I'd marked on the aerial photo, and then starting looking around for the "best spot" for a property corner. The Magellan handheld worked great, even after I dropped it face down onto concrete and ice while crossing an icy ford.
As for getting lost, after I'd marked the new corner, I knew how to get back, but because I had the GPS, I next decided to just march out into many acres/hectares of forest that I'd never walked before, confident that I would be able to make a nice loop, and wouldn't have to waste viewing time backtracking to get home. Without the GPS, I wouldn't have tried that stunt, and would have missed a wonderful walk in the woods.
As for a voice recorder, that would have been useful, but most GPS handhelds don't have that. W/o a recorder, what you do instead is create a "waypoint" (ie. a landmark) in the GPS, and key in a very short description. This takes forever, and you have to take off your gloves, and fumble through the crude text entry with numb fingers. Would have been much nicer to just hold down a waypoint button and say what you want about the current location.
If you are so goddam far from civilisation that you need GPS to safe your sorry hide, where are you gonna plug it in?
I took extra batteries. Turned out to be wise. GPS handhelds are watt-pigs.
As for the Garmin Palm w/ GPS specifically, yes, it looks overpriced. Yes, it is a dumb design.
I think the GPS+bluetooth cookie would be a good idea. I think a GPS+firewire dongle would be fine (firewire rather than USB to get power supplied to the GPS dongle.) My claim is that whenever you buy a GPS receiver, if you are buying any sort of all-in-one solution as I did, you are making many compromises, and creating proprietary entanglements. For example, if I want to download a map into my Magellan handheld, I need to use the Magellan software, and that software only runs on Windows. Grrrr.