Hasta La Gadget!

Those sadistic souls over at Lightning GPS are at it again, making the lives of parents and promiscuous children awesome and horrible, respectively. Just in case NavTrac’s RTV10 PND isn’t enough to keep your mind at ease when Johnny (and his track record of poor decision making) is out and about, there’s the newly announced NavGenius. At first glance, this here navigator is about as vanilla as they come, but underneath the shell is a dedicated tracking module which enables the owner to monitor every turn, stop and donut from the web. Heck, you can even re-route vehicles from any connected computer, and the owner can get an SMS should the driver exceed a certain speed or break a customizable perimeter. All that’s required to shatter the last pinch of trust you actually had with your offspring is $599.95 up front and $39.95 per month for the tracking service — which you only pay until they wise up and take a Louisville Slugger to the device.

Filed under: GPS

NavGenius PND looks like a GPS, is really a covert location tracker originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 05:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

TomTom decided to bust out a pair of announcements this morning, so we won’t waste any time getting right to the crux of it. That splendiferous GO 740 LIVE, which was introduced at CES this January, is finally shipping in the US of A. If you’ll recall, this is TomTom’s first connected navigation system, which can download real-time traffic information, fuel prices, weather reports, etc. If you’re intrigued, you can snag one now with three months of LIVE Services for $399.95. Moving on, we’ve got four new systems entirely: the ONE 140 / ONE 140s (3.5-inch display; 140S announces spoken street and place names) and the XL 340 / XL 340s (4.3-inch display; 340S includes speech functions). Each of these include the company’s IQ Routes technology and Advanced Lane Guidance, features that were previously reserved for higher-end PNDs; furthermore, the new crew also includes maps of Mexico. Catch ’em all this month for $179.95, $199.95, $229.95 and $249.95 in order of mention.

[Via GPSReview]

Read – GO 740 LIVE now shipping in US
Read – ONE 140 Series and XL 340 Series

Filed under: GPS

TomTom intros ONE 140 and XL 340 series, ships GO 740 LIVE originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Parents have more options for keeping tabs on their kids than ever before. Web browsers can limit surfing, Sprint Family Locator can track locations, and Ford offers parental controls on one of their cars. Now Hammacher Schlemmer, that 160-year-old bastion of oddball gadgets you never thought you needed, has unveiled the Driving Activity Reporter. It’s a $229 covert device that attaches to your car and assembles a detailed report of places, routes, and speeds traveled.

The Driving Activity Reporter has a neodymium magnet for mounting in a glove box, under the seat, or against any metal surface. Inside, there’s a 16-channel GPS receiver that collects transmissions from 24 Department of Defense satellites to track movement, as well as on-board flash memory that can store 100 hours of information. To read the reports, the user takes the device, plugs it into a free USB port on a PC, and downloads the data.

In other words, it’s a magnetic USB drive with a GPS radio. It also includes a sleep mode to conserve battery power—in typical use, owners get about three weeks of operation from a set of AAA batteries—and the data can be read via its on-board mapping software or even fed into Google Earth.

We’re a long way from Ford and Microsoft’s EVA and her soothingly monotone stream of helpfulness, but it seems Ford is already prepping her for a dose of… feeling. The company has filed a patent called “Emotive Text-to-Speech System and Method” describing a system that can not only simulate emotion when reading out directions and describing traffic problems, but could also detect the emotion of the operator of the car and interact with them in ways designed to, oh, soothe a little road rage. The avatar is said to “appear to become frustrated” if the driver is a lead-foot, and may say “Your driving is hurting my fuel efficiency.” Or, if a driver is going too fast, the dash-bound assistant could turn blue, ask what’s wrong, and suggest a more direct route to their destination. It all sounds terrifically annoying, and we can only hope this disembodied nag will be a little easier to deactivate than 2001’s HAL — and a little less prone to singing, too.

[Via Autoblog]

Filed under: Transportation

Ford patent describes the digital backseat driver you never wanted originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

As with Navigon’s booth yesterday, Garmin’s CeBIT showcase was overflowing with Earthlings. Many of which, as you could likely guess, were swooning over the recently announced nüvi 1200 and 1300 series navigators. Naturally, the flavors found here in Hannover were those with different variations of European maps, but aside from the routes, everything will be the same on North American versions. The hippest addition to these two are the public transit maps, which inform individuals on foot what subway / tube to hop on, where to get off, which bus to take from there and how long to stay on. Frankly, it’s a Euro-tripper’s dream come true. Check out the photo gallery below, and if you’re wondering, there’s evidently no “Engadget” within the confines of “Germany.” We’d argue otherwise, of course.

Filed under: GPS

Garmin nüvi 1200 and 1300 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments