Mariners rejoice, today Garmin announced a newly enhanced GPS receiver to aid in decking out your dinghy this upcoming season. Serving both practical and frivolous purposes, you can pick up this newly announced unit without the guilt associated with buying a device that only serves to entertain… if that kind of guilt affects you.
Garmin is towing the line, with the GPSMAP 640 touchscreen portable. It comes preloaded with comprehensive street and marine charts, but with a major change in the form factor. Garmin was looking to merge the look and usability of their popular Nüvi series with this highly specialized, albeit dated looking, GPSMAP portable.
For this refresh, Gamin has slimmed down the case, ditched the antenna, and beefed up the screen. The end product looks striking similar to every other PND out there, but boasts an intuitive, waterproof, 5.2” touchscreen display, with an 800 x 480 resolution, surrounded by a much thinner beveled case, and tons of tidbits for the sailor.
The docking cradles, that compliment the system, are specific to the application. Dock the unit in the marine cradle and the GPS starts up in marine mode, and vise versa for the car. This certainly beats scouring the menus to change modes.
Data presented on this meticulous monitor could save you some major headaches. Garmin’s BlueCharts has been upgraded to include shaded depth contours, port plans, wrecks, and restricted areas. Upgrade again, to BlueCharts g2 Vision, and get automatic chart plotting.
Seafarers will find endless uses for this detailed navigational information presented on the GPSMAP 640, but add the optional XM radio/weather satellite receiver, and you’ll be good to sail the seven seas endlessly - without incident or running out of tunes.
Press Release
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Monday, October 6, 2008
Seafaring Just Got Easier - Thanks to Garmin
Thursday, May 22, 2008
JVC KD-NX5000: So Good They Don't Dare Change it
Tech junkies of the world unite your dollars and take over one of these super functional, feature laden GPS car receivers from JVC. These units are so well engineered JVC left well enough alone this year. They’ve reintroduced the KD-NX5000 as is. This move is a bit surprising, especially in a tech culture of planned obsolescence. But, considering the unit had only been out for 5 months when this announcement was made…it really kind of makes sense.
Today, media servers have taken up residence in our autos, and the KD-NX5000 is a true media mogul; it’s 40GB internal hard drive holds up to 460 Albums of music. The combination CD/DVD/GPS device includes 24GB available space. Media is loaded on the HDD only through CD, which is a bit of a down side, but not having to carry 460 CDs after you’ve loaded it up makes it all better.
The JVC KD-NX5000 packs an impressive array of media savvy ways. It plays MP3, WMA, and WAV audio formats, DivX and MP3 video formats, and displays JPEG images. The MP3 audio file’s ID3 tag info is also displayed, making browsing huge music libraries quickly a conceivable option.
This thing looks great installed, and with rocker keys accessing all (they saved a few for the remote) of the receiver’s functions, the faceplate is surprisingly uncluttered and easy to use. The screen size may turn off some movie lovers, but DVD movie playback on the 3.5 inch screen, same size as an iPod Touch, is easily viewable from the driver seat.
Preloaded GPS data includes Navtaq maps of Canada and the 50 States...
as well as over 13 million points of interest. A built-in RDS-TMC tuner allows for real-time traffic reports. Text-to-voice gives guided directions with, or instead of the music; which one is up to you. Address input happens in a few ways, but the quickest is to find an address by telephone number. If you don’t know the number you can use input the address or the longitude and latitude values (like you’d have those handy). For those that like to confirm things over the phone before setting out, the quite useful telephone number is displayed after each address is located.
Envisioned as more of a highway navigator the map zoom only goes in as far as about five blocks, leaving the map detail somewhat lacking for larger city map reading, but it will still get you were you need to go if you provide an address. Also, no touch screen means scrolling to each letter you wish to write. This is why the phone number method of address input is preferable.
For those tech heads that want it all, you can tune in satellite radio and make Bluetooth calls with some additional equipment.
..Cnet reviews..
JVC KS-BTA200 Bluetooth Adapter
JVC KS-PD100 iPod Adapter
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Thursday, May 8, 2008
Clarion MAP780 using iGO My Way 8
Clarion's two newest Personal Navigation Devices the MAP680 & MAP780, from Clarion's German site, reverberated through the vascular system that is the blog-o-sphere by way of Navigadget on Tuesday.
These impressive GPS units, that were announced in April and include iGO 3D mapping software, have also made their there way to Youtube. Showing the device in action, the video demonstrates a no-joke navigator with mad 3D rendering skills provided by iGO's My Way 8 software, a 3D map rendering application designed for portables.
This upgrade gives you access to so much terrain/building mapping data you may never have to look at the road again. Well, there's still that bit concerning other cars and people getting in your way. Although, these units will have you wanting to keep them in front of you.
Clarion has included all the functionality you'd expect from a high-end PND, but they also added some you might not.
These knowledgeable navi's boast SMS (texting) capabilities, and can connect to a streaming audio service. The differences in the units are mainly disc space and what maps are loaded on those flash memories.
The Clarion MAP680 includes regional map information only, the region in this case is Germany so that includes four countries on it's 1GB internal storage. The MAP680's partner in 3D map rendering touts quite a bit more mapping data, 43 European countries are stored on it's 2GB Memory. Both devices can be expanded and accept SD cards.
No word on when Clarion will grace us with an American version of these mapping moguls but the software is available, a manufacturer just needs to bring it to market in the US.
Panasonic Strada CN-GP50U Portable Navigator w/ 5" Screen
Pioneer AVIC-S2 Portable Smart GPS Navigation with 3.5" Touch Display
Uniden GPS402 Portable In-Vehicle Navigation System features: 4" EZ Touch display
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Monday, December 17, 2007
Blackberry Owners Get Even More Spoiled
As if owning one of these objects of an email addict’s desire wasn’t pampering yourself enough, Mapquest has launched their newest application, Navigator 5.0, which turns your GPS enabled BlackBerry into a multi-function personal navigation device. Now, you never have to look up from you phone again. Seriously though, for a small monthly subscription fee you get all the features of a stand alone PND, with one big advantage, no extra device to lug around.
Mapquest Navigator 5.0 enables your Blackberry GPS to track your position on a 3-D map, give voice guided turn-by-turn directions, provide real-time traffic reports, watch gas prices, and bestow city specific restaurant information from AOL. If this concept gets you excited, act fast, if you sign up by the end of the year you get a promotional rate. If you're an owner of a Windows based smartphone don't throw it out just yet, Mapquest will be adding support for other phone models throughout the new year.
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