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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."
Give me 802.11g and more memory. Seriously, 32MB? How hard would it be to put 64 or 128MB? My ancient MP3 player has 64MB integrated... Is there a limitation of the PalmOS or something???
So, if this is SD/IO capable then you can drop a bluetooth card in there.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
... 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.
Secure Digital Slot.
This is functionality that is being moved out into secondary cards, because the chipsets and antenna have become small enough. A GPS Antenna has to be significantly larger, hence, the Handspring cards, and this Antenna. Personally, I use the eTrex Vista a LOT, and this will probably be my next handheld, after a Visor Platinum. Good work Garmin.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
If this unit comes with 32 MB that's room for only seven songs. Gee, why not advertise that it plays movies too. 30 whole seconds worth!
Oh. You want maps and music? Sorry Charlie.
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.
Its a common thing with the slashdot crowd, something comes along with GPS and they moan about bluetooth (there could be issues with the GPS getting interference from bluetooth). If it had bluetooth it would be 802.11b, if it had that it would be the screen size, if it had that it would be too big.
HEY FOLKS A QUICK REALITY CHECK.
Having EVERYTHING costs money, these devices are aimed at sectors that want "just enough" at a reasonable price rather than "every damn thing under the sun" just so you can impress your mates.
If it had everything and was $1000 you'd bitch about the price.
In summary: The Slashdot crowd wants
A Tablet PC with a flexible paper thin screen that can be folded from the size of a credit card to A0, which has GPS, Bluetooth, Firewire 400 & 800, USB 1 and 2, every wireless connection method under the Sun, IRDA, Biometric authentication, works via a keyboard or a "keyboard glove", has a 15Ghz Transmeta processor, 1TB of RAM, 1PB of Storage, runs off a single AA battery for 3 year, runs Linux and responds to scribbles or the spoken word.
And costs under $100. Only then will people on Slashdot not moan about the features... except to complain how X they bought a year ago is now out of date and uncool.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
They are always good in one area, but in another area I need it is skimped upon or left out. This is a pest because it would be incredibly handy to have one for my work but I cann't bring myself to waste money on something inadiquite.
Perhaps my problem is I just don't have enough money to spend on a whizz-bang one. Ah. Thats it.
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.
Just wait for this story the 2nd time around, I am sure it will be up as soon as taco hears about it in a few days...
The specs of this new gadget don't sound too different from the Tungsten T...they exchanged Bluetooth and the 5-way navigation pad for GPS and twice as much memory. It's likely to have the same audio problem, unless Palm is supplying Garmin with a fixed version of Palm OS.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Do you use a Palm Pilot? Unless you're trying to use it as portable MP3 player, it really doesn't need much memory. It doesn't seem to have the bloat of MSFT based products. I've been looking for things to fill the memory on my M515... at 5MB, a dictionary has been the best addition! Anyway, if you need more memery, it is expandable.
I think the point here is there are already ARE handhelds with bluetooth and not GPS...SO if that's what you want this unit isn't for you. HOWEVER if you want a GPS one and don't care about what's "standard" because you want whay you need, this MIGHT be the unit for you. That's what's great about not having ALL handhelds be the same, people have choices, adn can get what they WAY. What an amazing concept....choices.......
it has to play OGG Vorbis!
Is it me, or are the newest Palm (Palm OS 5???) devices over-priced. They're getting in to the same price range as Pocket PCs, yet they don't have as much functionality or versatility. I recently opted to get a Palm M515 for CAD$360 (USD$230) and it fullfills my needs well. It seems to me that the increase in functionality going to a new Palm is less than the increase in functionality going to a PPC, yet the price increases are almost the same.
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 other night I was walking through a rat shack and noticed a GPS unit for handhelds on the wall for $99. I did a little research into it when I got home and found out that it's actually made by DeLorme, comes with XMap/Street Atlas 2003 and supports the NMEA output standards. Output from the GPS unit itself is an RJ11 jack, and it includes three cables (Palm mSeries, iPaq 31xx/36xx, iPaq 38xx/39xx) with others supposedly available online for laptops. After a little tinkering and figuring, I got it working just fine with my monochrome iPaq 3150.
I went to a different rat shack last night to pick up the unit, and found even more surprises. It's on sale right now (if you can catch the promotion before they pretend it doesn't exist - one place said it never existed, the other said it -shouldn't- exist even though they had the red and white tag on the wall) for $69. It runs on batteries or 6 volts of DC for maximum flexibility. With my particular iPaq of the non-sync-charging variety, there's no reason I can't charge the iPaq and the GPS at the same time with a decent dual outlet inverter.
For a total cost of $300 (Including the $150 iPaq) I have a perfect wardriving kit in need of software. Yes, I'm rambling. Time for Concerta.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Mapping Software. You have to travel pretty extensively to require a pocket atlas. Most 'normal' people can take a quick look at a map before they leave and maybe scribble a couple of notes on a PostIt. If I have an appointment, it is not unusual for someone to email me a local map in advance.
GPS. GPS! For God's sake! When was the last time you got so lost that you needed friggin' GPS to pinpoint your location to the nearest ten feet. If you are that bad at navigating, you should not be let out alone. Does it come with distress flares and a survival kit?
Voice recorder for making memos, quick notes, and messages on the fly. Just in case the GPS let's you down, you can leave a message for your loved ones - assuming anybody finds your cold, lifeless body.
Rechargeable internal Lithium-ion battery. If you are so goddam far from civilisation that you need GPS to safe your sorry hide, where are you gonna plug it in?
Built-in 32 MB of memory for downloading map data and other Palm OS-compatible software. At this point I would prefer a means of lighting a fire and perhaps obtaining fresh food and water. A raft would be useful. I suppose you would die secure in the knowledge that your Palm Pilot was fully up-to-date.
New ARM processor enhances battery life, screen redraw, graphics, and audio. Can it skin a rabbit or fend off hungry crocodiles?.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that you are the kind of person who needs 80% of the above features in order to manage your hectic schedule. You must be a pretty busy guy huh? Probably one of the high-flying, go-get-em entrepreneurs who can never afford to miss an appointment or be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In which case, where the fuck do you find the time to play games and listen to MP3s?
This is a toy for pencil dicks who can't afford a Ferrari.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
One of the best things about the T68/Tungsten combo is how easy it is to get online with it. The Tungsten discovered the phone quickly and I was able to set it up easily. Having the two connected is great - I sent all of my phone contacts to the bluetooth with a couple of clicks and use the Tungsten SMS software regularly.
Getting on to the internet was also fairly simple. My phone is connected to the Orange network in the UK, so I called them (dial 156) and got them to activate GPRS. With GPRS activated Orange become my ISP and I pay them for KB downloaded.
Then I opened the preferences on Web Pro and set the service as orange, the user name as orange, entered the password, and chose my 'BT to t68' connection. In the phone number box I wrote "*99***1#" (information I got from a newsgroup) and I set up the primary and secondary DNS information from the Orange web site.
I'd reccommend turning off images to safe money.
Setting up Versa Mail was a little trickier, but the system very useable once set up.
Now wash your hands.
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.But the people who would want this device would buy it for the GPS, and wouldn't want to pay extra for bluetooth if they'll never use it.
Think about it. If you need GPS, do you think you would be mostly using the thing while you're sitting in your office next to your little bluetooth enabled gizmo?
What's bluetooth going to do for you while you're driving around downtown trying to find some client? When it only takes on the order of 2 seconds to plug in a USB/serial/whatever cable, I
So if this isn't a device you want - go get one with bluetooth and no GPS.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
My ultimate portable device would have the following features:
- GSM
- GPS
- MP3 player
- Upgradable OS and software
- Bluetooth
- J2ME
- Small and light
- Big color display
- Upgradable storage, ie MMC
The Neonode N1 comes pretty close.
PDAs are getting bigger, better screens ...
GPSs are getting bigger, better screens ... (for mapping)
These devices can no longer always be small. Having a single screen for several devices helps offset this fact.
"Are you on some kind of medication?"
"No"
"Well, you should be."
--Bean
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...
The GPS PDA is one of the first devices to contain the new DragonBall MXL (MC9328MXL), according to this.
Its ARM9-based, is 150mhz and does 150mips. Doesn't sound like much, but its only US$10.30 in "low volumes". It has an MMU so it would run linux. I'd like a cheap, small, LART style computer with some useful IO (ethernet, serial ports etc) I can run linux on and generally hack about with. This seems like an ideal CPU (shame it doesn't have integrated ethernet though).
ever try a map?
Yes. It did not beep to tell me when to turn. I could not download a route to it. It could not be updated over the web. Yeah. It sucked.
or setting your alarm clock a little sooner?
If you have to be at client A at 9:00AM, client B at noon, and client C at 3:00PM, how does setting your alarm clock sooner help you get to clients B and C on time?
How about the people who would rather have bluetooth then gps becuase they work in there city?
How about people who would rather have a socket wrench because they work in a garage? What the f*** kind of dumb-assed question is that? This device is obviously aimed at people who need GPS. Duh!
Here's a clue for you: Garmin builds GPSs. It's what they do. Complaining that Garmin included GPS rather than Bluetooth is is like being pissed off that McDonalds meal came with fries rather than socks.
The price isn't all that bad, considering that you're getting most of the features of a PocketPC, and a GPS, in addition to Palm stability.
Only thing is, I wonder what the battery life is like with the color screen. I understand people liking color for the "cool" factor. But greyscale is almost as functional and has much better batter life.
The Garmin device uses a different ARM chip (the Motorola Dragonball MXL) from the Tungsten T (which uses a TI OMAP 1510). This means different sound playback hardware, and its almost certain, much clearer sound playback. The OMAP's DSP handles sound processing, and Palm installed a low-pass filter in the DSP to improve sound quality for voice recording. However, they didn't make this switchable, causing grief for music playback software. This will likely be fixed when Palm does an OS update for the device.
I don't see why everyone keeps using the MSRP to bitch about something being to expensive. When was the last time you paid the MSRP for anything?
http://www.tvnav.com/ will have the iQue for $455. You can pre-order now. They are very reputable.