GPS
I am planning on moving to the west coast (Seattle, WA) later this summer with my 2 year old Bernese, Swiss mountain Dog. Because one doesn’t always get this opportunity to drive cross country, I would like to see some cool interesting stuff off the beaten trail. Do you have any recommendations for portable, ie can be swapped between cars, navigation GPS’s? I use a Black Macbook so it would be nice if I could Google certain national parks, hotels that allow pets, fairs, festivals etc on my Mac and then up load the way points or points of interest to the nav unit.
Out of all the GPS units I’ve reviewed and played with, my favorite is the TomTom GO 910. It’s very portable, and was the most pleasant experience. It even had some very welcoming narrators. You may not need all the features of the 910, but I would suggest looking for a TomTom unit that fits your needs.
I also like the Navicore GPS system in combination with the Nokia N800. The N800 is Linux based, so if you wanted to pursue the ability to get information from Google on your computer to Navicore, you could post on the forum and someone might be able to make it happen. That’s the nice thing about the N800 being opensource. New features and applications are released all the time based on what users want in the system. The N800 does GPS, and a lot more than a typical GPS system. It costs less too. The downside is that we found it to be slow compared to TomTom. If you enter a new destination, TomTom recalculates the route immediately. Navicore was considerably slower. Again, though, Navicore and the N800 are constantly being updated and improved, so I expect it to speed up and get better with future development.
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Wil Wheaton in the Revision3 podcast InDigital did a review of the DigiWalker C310x (http://www.miogps.com/US/products_c310xfeatures.htm), and rated it as his favorite sub $200 GPS system, both for ease of use, portability and reliability. If memory serves, his only complaint was that if you had verbal reminders enabled (a la, “turn right on 5th Ave. in 500 yards) it would remind you a lot. Like, in five miles, in one mile, in a half mile, in 500 yards, in 100 yards, etc.
But if memory serves, that was his one and only complaint. If you want, check out the episode he reviewed it in (http://revision3.com/indigital/tesla and his review of the unit starts at about 11 minutes).
Yes - I highly recommend the 910. It’s incredibly feature-heavy and worth every penny. A more economical option is the One or One XL, both of which do the job.
By the way the TomTom system are also mostly Linux based.
http://www.tomtom.com/page.php?Page=gpl