Waypoints – December 8, 2009

It’s a good day to be the owner of a Garmin Oregon and / or Motorola Droid…

Garmin Oregon beta

Garmin has rolled out new beta firmware with some great added features. These include:

• Customized dashboards can now be added to the map and computer screens. Dashboard options include Compass, Stopwatch, Active Geocache, and Elevation Plot.
• You can now view the elevation plot of an upcoming active route or currently navigated track in blue (shown at right).
• Some great new track navigation options, which are detailed at the Garmin Trail Tech blog. I completely agree with their statement that “for many customers, navigating a saved track is the best option for providing guidance along a desired trail.” I encourage you to go and read their post in detail. The new features include automatically adding high and low elevation points for a track, and adding any waypoints along it to the active route. I suspect that mileage calculations will now be based on the track and not “as the crow flies” distances, though I’ve yet to verify this. There are also some tips posted at the Garmin Oregon wiki. UPDATE: I recently put together a post with some tips on using this new track navigation feature.

Google Maps update for Android

If you’ve got an Android 1.6+ phone, go to the App Market and grab the latest version of Google Maps, for the following features…

Long tap on the map and then tap the balloon that comes up; you’ll see two new features – What’s Nearby and Report a Problem. But the even cooler stuff is found once you go to Menu > More > Labs, allowing you to enable the following features:

• Scale bar
• Terrain layer
• Popular categories – Restaurants by cuisine, and more
• Layer button – Gives on-screen access to layers
• Compass arrow – Show which way you’re facing while stationary

You can read more about the Android updates at Google LatLong.

More Droid news…

…and some of it is even location-related

• The augmented reality app, Layar is now available in the App market
• As is Yelp’s review app
• You can also download Google Goggles, allowing you to conduct web searches with your camera