Hasta La Gadget!

Whether you’re going on a vacation, a hike, or you just like to watch where the day takes you — from an almost voyeuristic viewpoint –, the Trackstick II is the tool for you. The Trackstick II combines 4GB USB flash storage with a GPS tracking and geolocation device, and a pedometer.

Using the tool, you can geotag the photos you save to the drive with your current location and save them to Flickr, see where you are at any point in time using Google Maps, and count the number of steps and see how far you’ve traveled in a day.

The Trackstick II is powered by a pair of AAA batteries, and once it’s turned on, it’ll keep track of where you roam. When you plug it in to your computer, a Google Map will conveniently show you where you’ve been. You can share that Google Map, along with your path and waypoints, with friends.

The Trackstick II reminds me a lot of the SPOT Satellite Messenger, except without the emergency assistance, or check-in features. In other words, not as useful, but still fun. The Trackstick II will set you back $199 US, and is available now. 

In the 10 years since President Clinton ordered the military to unscramble the GPS signal, the big benefit has been to increase accuracy from about 100 yards to just a few feet. It makes navigation devices more accurate. Before, when civilians got what was called selective availability, GPS knew more or less if you were on the highway; now it knows if you’re centered in your lane. It’s still not good enough for autonomous driving. But there are other benefits we’ll see before we see self-driving cars:

We’ve just returned from a ride with the TomTom Go Live 1000. In general, the device met our relatively high expectations set by a purported flagship navigator from the likes of TomTom. Unfortunately, the prototype unit guiding our vehicle was limited to a scripted demonstration on pre-selected routes. And when we did veer off course thanks to an unhelpful, but rather posh, voice guiding us to turn left a bit early, it took about 8 seconds for the ARM 11 device to reroute — not bad but not exactly the 0 seconds we were promised during the pitch. Again, we were told that this was the result of using a prototype device… though it must be a near production-ready model given the summer launch timeframe. The unit also wasn’t equipped with the automatic volume adjustment that raises and lowers volume based on the ambient noise around it. We did witness the Webkit UI in action and it does seem significantly improved based on our brief 15 minute test ride with it. However, it was still cumbersome enough to give our tour guide (a TomTom quality manager) fits as he tried to jump between 2D and 3D navigation modes. And the capacitive touchscreen was a mixed bag: at times it seemed to require the kind of finger mashing usually reserved for resistive screens; at others it was a bit too sensitive to effectively target street names from a pick list while being jostled about on a Dutch road (accidentally brushing the display selected the entry either above or below the street desired). As bad as all this sounds, we had the good fortune to have a Garmin nuvi 1690 in the vehicle with us to go head-to-head, flagship-to-flagship, and the Go Live 1000 was the clear winner in getting us back to our starting location. Check the Go Live 1000 in action after the break.

Continue reading TomTom Go Live 1000 taken for first test drive (video)

TomTom Go Live 1000 taken for first test drive (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Geocaching, as we’ve all learned by now, is a sort of high-tech treasure hunt where people use coordinates and GPS handhelds to find caches left by other people. Players typically use either GPS devices designed for hikers or smartphone apps, but now they have their own dedicated gadget. Magellan has introduced the eXplorist GC, a compact device created just for geocaching.

The eXplorist is preloaded with data for popular geocaches and offers a color screen, rich graphics, and an easy-to-use interface. Even if you’ve never geocached before, you’ll find it simple to start. The eXplorist is waterproof and works for 18 hours off two AA batteries. A SiRFstarIII GPS chipset provides location info. Look for it in April for a list price of $199.99.