Waypoints – March 18, 2006

GPS and mapping odds and ends from this past week:

Garmin and TomTom

• Brian Sooy compares the TomTom GO with the Garmin nuvi, on his blog "design matters".
• TomTom and Garmin aren’t buddies, but they both have products with similar names. TomTom Buddies is reminiscent of features in Garmin’s Rino line, while the partnership between Garmin and GPS-Buddy is clearly aimed at the commercial GPS tracking market.
• You can check out the new TomTom GO 910 in a demo video found at Club TomTom.
• Garmin has released MapSource version 6.10.2.
• Garmin owned MotionBased has announced that you can now import Garmin Training Center history (.hst) files into MotionBased.
• They have also announced partial Mac support for MotionBased.

Other brands

• Here are links to Engadget posts on Sony PSP getting GPS and seven new Mio devices that were introduced at CeBit, the German electronics show.
• In this rundown from CeBit, you can check out pictures of some of the new Mio products, as well as new offerings from Garmin and TomTom.
• The acquisition of Lowrance by Simrad Yachting has been completed.

All the rest

• Ed Parsons reports on the growing use of GPS in cars, and the concomitant lack of satellite navigation savvy by their owners.
• Frequent flyers may be interested in SlimTRAK, a GPS tracking solution for lost luggage. I sure could have used this at Christmas, when US Air misplaced my bags for several days.
• Dale DePriest’s march 17 entry reports that the number of WAAS satellites has increased from two to four.
• If you’re a map junkie like me, you probably have a bunch of paper maps somewhere around the house. Designorati: Cartography has tips on caring for your map collection.
• Google Earth Blog has a piece about how the Sierra Club is using Google Earth to publicize the sale of up to 800,000 acres of public land by the U.S. government.

Technorati tags: GPS