Buying the receiver.
While my “thoughts cells” war over each other whether to buy the GPS Receiver, my urge decided to put an end to the fight by heading down to Eastgear to buy the product, days before I went to Malaysia for a short trip.
The downsides I thought initially-like why I need to pay few hundred dollars just to tell me where to turn left or right in Singapore- weren’t too bad. At least I bought the receiver at a bargain. Since I reasoned I do not own a PDA therefore having no need for the software, the Boss gave me a special price of $99 (dollars less than the priced they offered at the IT fair).
About Global Positioning System
From “I know where I am `anywhere from this world`”, to spying tracking devices seen in movies, or high tech waypoint tracking anti-terrorism attack tactics in the game Rainbow Six: Rouge Spear -these are a reality with GPS. Basically GPS has a network of satellites hovering round the globe, broadcasting data down to earth. What a receiver does is it picks up these data, perform some mathematics on them, and let you know your whereabouts. Not so complex like a device communicating with outer space, almost works like a radio receiver. That’s is why these devices could last 10 hours on 2 hours of battery charging.
Usage
Some good things about having a Bluetooth GPS receiver are its processor is dedicated for GPS processing, and you can share the receiver among different people on different platforms (eg. Laptop, PDA, Smartphones..)
I tried running it on a PDA (not mine) with MapKings which is pretty nice looking and good. Forgoing buying MapKings, you could try the malsingmaps, the free community contributed GPS garmin-based maps covering Singapore and Malaysia. There you get instructions to make the garmin software work with non-garmin bt receivers.
Smartphones (Symbian based) aren’t left out. Nokia released Smart2Go, which they acquired last year, for free this month. IMO, Smart2Go is a pretty good GPS software (for S60 3rd Edition, N and E series phone users can use them. There’s a version for Windows Mobile too), and they provide maps covering countries almost everywhere on earth. Its features include 2d/3d views, poi(place of interests-landmarks, parking..), routing, (and if you pay for) detailed maps and voice navigation. Smart2Go is also actually the software which they named Nokia Maps for N95 (known for its GPS support and smartphone features). Well nokia had a free GPS software called NRC - Nokia Sports Tracker, although very data based, very usefully and perhaps a Garmin Forerunner replacement.
Well, there are other interesting commerical GPS software for smartphones but I’ll not mention them. You can read up SmartCOM GPS, Route 66, AGIS Navigator.
As for myself with a pitefully S40 j2me phone, I have my fair share of j2me applications to test and will be reviewing them shortly.
Beep beep beep… Satellite connection disconnects.
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