[Caution: long post. Feel free to ignore this one if you don’t care about GPS stuff.]
Last summer, I bought a bluetooth GPS unit just before our summer vacation. At the time, I ranted about the sorry state of GPS on the Mac. As I am about to go on another trip (driving to Toronto for four days), I thought I’d check out the SOTW again.
Unfortunately, nothing useful has happened in the interim.
Route 66 doesn’t seem to be even offering a Mac solution anymore (but it’s hard to tell from their website). This is apparently no great loss, since I have never seen a positive review of the Mac version.
MacGPS Pro has been updated a couple of times, and now supports moving waypoints and routes between a GPS and Google Earth; this might be useful if I had a GPS with a display, but I don’t. There still doesn’t seem to be any simple (hopefully automated) way of getting your own maps into it. Real maps still cost extra money. It still doesn’t do route planning itself, or provide directions, spoken or otherwise. I stand by what I said previously:
This might be useful if you were doing marine navigation, or some such, but its not for road travellers.
So the best way for Mac users to get navigation and route planning still seems to be to get a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips for Windows and run it on VirtualPC. Boo. Actually, with a new Intel MacBook Pro and a copy of Parallels Workstation, I bet that running Streets & Trips would be perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, I still haven’t convinced anyone to give me a replacement for my PB15. Oh well, maybe next year.
Which leads me to Palm based navigation.
My friend Ken got the palmOne GPS Navigator. In general, he likes the included TomTom software but has two significant complaints:
- There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to get the address for a POI — which, for example, is a problem when you’re trying to find out if the only Sheraton it knows about in a particular city is the one that you have reservations for (or whether it’s one of the other five).
- The map data is pretty sparse for Canadian locations. [hint: The closest Canadian Tire to my house is not in Mississauga.]
These complaints, plus the fact that it’s almost 300 $CDN at retail in Ottawa, have not immediately endeared me to this solution.
On a more prosaic note, it doesn’t look like there have been significant updates to Mapopolis since we used it on our vacation last summer. On that trip, we used my wife’s Zire 72, but since she’s not travelling with me this time, I’m stuck with the LifeDrive — that rant is a subject for another post. Mapopolis makes several dire warnings [caution: PDF link] about running on the LifeDrive, but the most important of these is:
The LifeDrive requires a Bluetooth GPS unit with the new microcode (i.e., Mobile Crossing BT-308, Globalsat 338 or clone thereof) for a reliable BT connection.
As it happens, the MG668 I got last year does not have the new microcode. However, up until I got the last LifeDrive ROM update, I was able to use the MG668; it was flaky, but still usable. Unfortunately, ever since I installed the update, talking to it from the LifeDrive using Mapopolis will cause the LD to lock up within a minute. *sigh*.
Of course, I could solve this problem by just buying another Zire 72 and running the software on that, but the retail price on these is also close to 300 $CDN. Even I can see that that would be suboptimal, even if it did mean I could put the LD away on a shelf.
So what am I to do? Now that I have travelled with a GPS, I wouldn’t want to go with out one. For me at least, knowing exactly where you are at all times really does remove a lot of the stress.
Well, it turns out there is a third way. I called my buddies at Mobile GPS Online (who are based in Ottawa) and asked them if they had either the Mobile Crossing BT-308 or the GlobalSat 338 in stock. Wouldn’t you know it, they had the 338, so I went over and picked one up. I guess 190 $CDN is still not cheap, but if it worked with the LD and I didn’t have to buy new software, that’s still better than $300.
I brought it home and set it up to charge, then went over to my sister-in-law’s house for her birthday party — Happy 40’th Stacey. When I got back, I grabbed it and my LifeDrive, and told Deb I was “going down to Tim’s for a coffee” (/em winks).
So, moment of truth time: I started Mapopolis, told it to start the GPS — of course, I want to turn the damn bluetooth on –, hit the power button on the 338 and… it connected on the first try. Yes! Now to see how long it stayed connected…
The punch line: It works perfectly. It stayed up and showed me where I was on the moving map all the way over to Tim’s. On the way back, I asked for directions back to my house, and it voice nav’ed me all the way home (with street names). Woo hoo!
All is not perfect, of course. It did route me off of the street I was on, around a crescent and back onto the street again. Oh well. Now that it’s actually working, it’s worth experimenting with it.
That’s great. I’m sure you could unload your current BT GPS receiver on someone who uses a laptop. Let me know how much and I’ll spread the word.
I agree that I don’t actually need the MG668 any more. If Deb doesn’t want it, then I’ll let it go cheap to a friend or reasonably priced to an acquaintance. 😉
In case you were thinking about asking me for it, the old GPS unit has been sold.