Fresh on the heels of Elizabeth’s genius post on the TomTom yesterday, I found this little gem, and thought to myself, “Self, She really could have used one of these on her trip!”  What is it, you ask?  It’s a Bluetooth GPS receiver that literally fits on your keychain.  Wow.

My favorite part about this new product is the fact that it only runs $99.  So, if you’re the lucky type that has a SmartPhone, BlackBerry, or any other type of gadget that for some reason does not have a GPS chip, you simply grab this little device, and voila, your phone now has GPS capability.  What’s also pretty darn sweet about this little guy is the fact that on a single charge, the battery will last well into 10 hours.  Ten hours folks, is a lot of time off the charger, so don’t worry about this dying on your workday commute.

The device uses Bluetooth 2.0 and you can “connect simultaneously to up to 20 satellite channels, operate for ten hours on a single charge, sports a tracking sensitivity of 159 dBm, supports an external antenna, and purportedly plays nice with your BT-enabled device from up to ten meters away.”  Not bad friends, not bad at all.

Share This

Before embarking on last month’s road trip, we purchased a TomTom global navigation system.

For the past decade, the bulk of my trips have been the fly/rental car variety. Increasingly in the past years, my cars have come equipped with a GPS.

There are few things I hate more than those tiny place-mat maps the Airport car rental places give you.

The only place they have ever successfully steered me is into the freight hangars.

So I took to GPS like a duck to cool, deep puddle and planned on making sure the next car we buy has it factory-installed.

But a portable after-market system in the meantime? Seemed like an unnecessary luxury in this Mapquest world.

Then, the day before embarking on my 10,000-mile boondoggle, my husband came home with a TomTom. Like an adult, I squealed and hopped around the driveway.

The portable system ran us about $300. We chose it over the integrated option with my husband’s Blackberry because, well, I’m the one that does most of the getting lost in this relationship.

The installation was a matter of attaching a suction cup.

With John Cleese telling us to ‘turn left NOW’, off we stepped.

It never occurred to us to check if it would work in Canada. No worries, even in the most rural bits of northern New Brunswick the device knew where to go.

The multiple-stop planning option was outstanding. We were able to integrate all the destinations - client sites, hotels, desired detours - it a single plan. The estimated travel times and on-the-fly recalculations were about 90% correct. Huge improvement over the other systems I’ve used (perhaps a simple matter of the algorithm getting smarter) and Mapquest.

In sum, the gadget steered us faithfully  except for some spells where the satellite signal was not available. The maps clear, construction and traffic avoided, and John’s sardonic wit occasionally shining through the basic ‘go here go there’ dialogue. By the end of the trip, we were ‘instrument driving’ - relying on TomTom  instead of looking out for upcoming exits or traffic.

The only improvement to our experience (excepting stronger satellites) would have been if we’d paired it with a Bluetooth headset like the one MoGo is rolling out. There were long stretches when it would have been nice to route the sound only to the driver’s ears.

Otherwise, I can heartily recommend this as a Father’s Day gift or just a regular Thursday purchase.

Share This