Reviews
A
complete Palm solution
iGolf SDIO GPS and Mapopolis NavCard combine to make a
Palm-based GPS mapping solution
For
the first time, it's now possible to carry around detailed street
level maps of the entire United States (except Alaska and Hawaii)
squished down into an SD card the size of a postage stamp on your
Palm, with absolutely no connection to a desktop or laptop computer
needed. Even better, if you own a Tapwave Zodiac÷the only Palm
OS device with two SD card slots÷you can do this with real-time,
talking, GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite navigation,
accurate down to less than the length of a car, with a tiny SD
GPS card receiver. No wires, no cables, no roof antenna, no GPS
hockey puck. This radical new capability requires purchasing products
from two companies.
Mapopolis
NavCard
The Mapopolis NavCard ($149) is a 1GB SD card that contains the
2005 NAVTEQ digital map data of all 48 states, and GPS capability.
It's compatible with the palmOne Tungsten T3, T5, C, Zire 72,
Treo 600, and Tapwave Zodiac. Treo 650 compatibility should be
included by the time you read this, as so many people are upgrading
to it from the 600. I tested NavCard on a Tapwave Zodiac 2 and,
with its fast CPU, and beautiful big landscape or portrait screen,
the results were extremely satisfying.
Through
the use of brilliant engineering and incredible compression, the
NavCard with its special version of Mapopolis and PSpeak (a digitized
voice engine feature) lets you find any address in the country,
plan routes, and navigate across cities, counties, states, and
even coast-to-coast, as it scrolls its map and, optionally, speaks
turn-by-turn directions. You never have to worry about what maps
you have installed since the entire USA is on the card, and route
planning and navigating is seamless across all boundaries. This
has never before been possible on a handheld, and it's quite an
achievement.
When
you insert NavCard for the first time, it checks to see if Mapopolis
and PSpeak are already on your Palm. If not, it offers to install
them with one tap. When NavCard's Mapopolis is upgraded in the
future, you need only install the new main program on your Palm,
and the locked SD NavCard will automatically recognize and work
with the newer version. A simple instruction sheet is provided,
which you can also see at http://64.208.105.215/qs.jsp but initial
setup is pretty idiot-proof. Insert the card, tap Îyes,' and you're
in business. Operation of NavCard's Mapopolis software is mostly
intuitive, logical, and straight forward. Like regular Mapopolis,
there's a settings screen with some buttons to adjust general
preferences, the display (day or night colors, font sizes), navigation
(turn voice prompting on or off, scroll or rotate the map to your
current GPS position), and GPS to tell it what kind of GPS receiver
you're using. For an SD GPS card (described later in this review)
select ăspecial connection.ä
Across
the bottom of the mapping screen are a dozen tiny zoom buttons
with the current zoom level marked dark blue. You can zoom out
so far you can see half the USA, and zoom in so close you can
pinpoint individual street addresses of homes and businesses,
marked with tiny icons. Tap one to see a business name or home
street address. Tap the zoom box, and drag out a square to zoom
in on that area. Move the map around with your finger, stylus,
or hard buttons. The farther down you zoom, the more detail is
displayed. Street names' letters follow the curvature of the street,
and rearrange themselves as you drive. Cool stuff.
A
down-arrow calls up a list of up to 30 locations you've previously
targeted as start or end destinations÷when the list is filled
with 30, new ones push the oldest ones off.
When
using GPS to plot a route, you can tell NavCard to use your current
GPS position, pick from your list of addresses, or use the Find
feature to locate any address anywhere. To do so, you simply tap
in a few characters of it, or search by Zip code, intersection,
city, or state. Because NavCard contains so much data, the longer
a route from A to B you want to plot, the longer it will take
to crunch the data and display it.
The
impossible becomes reality.
I plotted a trip route from my address to the White House, which
is 3,000 miles away. This involves a great many different streets,
highways, interstates, and ramps, and so it took NavCard about
five minutes of thinking before it finished whereas plotting a
route to a store in my locale took mere seconds. Keep in mind
that there is no other product for the Palm that can compute,
display, and give you spoken turn-by-turn directions for a route
across the entire country. However, by cramming the entire USA
onto one SD card, even a large one, some features found in regular
Mapopolis are missing from NavCard. There are fewer POIs (points
of interest) and 3D navigation is gone. I must admit that although
it's cute and techie, I personally don't miss the 3D view as it
can be rather confusing to look at. To me, the straight down map
view is easier and quicker to comprehend because it looks like
the kind of paper road map we're all used to.
The
missing POIs is a trade-off to get the whole USA onto the 1GB
card with barely room to spare; the product would have to ship
on a much more expensive 2GB card to include more. But in discussing
NavCard's features with the head of Mapopolis, I stressed it would
be more useful to plot routes to amusement parks, supermarkets,
hotels, and other typical tourist destinations as opposed to bus
stations and ferry terminals. Most people looking for bus stations
aren't carrying $500 PDAs or smartphones with expensive GPS receivers.
That's why they're taking the bus. Some re-thinking of POI priorities
are needed here. For instance, to route to Disneyland you need
to know its address. Most tourists won't. Do you?
So
while NavCard lacks some of the functionality of standard Mapopolis,
the fact that the whole country is on a single card makes it a
monumental achievement. It just needs a little tweaking.
The
Tapwave Zodiac advantage
And now, for the Zodiac fans out there, here's your killer app
part of the whole NavCard experience. Since NavCard supports different
connections to GPS receivers÷CF, Serial, Treo Serial, Infrared,
Bluetooth and ăspecial connectionä÷it uses the latter to talk
to SDIO GPS cards. The Zodiac is the only Palm that has two SD
slots. Thus, it's the only Palm in which you can have NavCard
in the left-hand SD slot and a tiny GPS unit on a card in the
SDIO slot. A completely handheld, one-piece solution to navigating
the entire USA. If that's not a killer app, I don't know what
is.
iGolf
Technologies is the developer, and the only source, of a PalmOS
SDIO GPS driver which was released in early 2005 and sells for
$25.00. It comes with a simple program called GPSTest to turn
on the card, show you it's searching for satellites, and inform
you when it has gotten a fix on enough satellites (at least three)
for GPS navigation. They also sell their driver and test program
in a $249.99 bundle with a Panasonic SDIO GPS card, which is the
one I tested, and is shown in the picture on the opposite page.
This
SD GPS Receiver is compatible with the Palm Tungsten 1, 2, 3,
5, C, E, Zire 31, 71, 72, Treo 650, and Zodiac, but is not compatible
with the Treo 600. The SD GPS Package comes with iGolfgps v.2,
a GPS mapping program for golf courses which I didn't test as
I'm not a golfer. It also, of course, comes with the SDIO driver
and GPSTest program.
iGolf
SDIO GPS
This petite GPS card, whose business end is about the size of
two sugar cubes, is a robust performer. Its internal Lithium battery,
which should last for years, requires a 14 hour initial charge.
After that, it draws power from the Palm device. It has no indicator
lights or physical switches or jacks as it is totally controlled
by software. Using either the GPSTest program or NavCard, the
unit typically gets a lock on enough satellites for navigation
in one to three minutes, depending on how well it ăseesä the sky.
In my around-town tests, I used this card in both a Treo 650 with
regular Mapopolis, and in my Zodiac 2 with NavCard in the other
slot, resting each PDA on my car's pull-out ashtray at the bottom
of the dash. The tiny receiver could see out the windshield from
that position with no need to buy and install any kind of PDA
mount hardware to position it up higher. When I said this Panasonic
SDIO GPS card is robust, I meant it.
Now
a small PDA screen a few feet from your face is not the equal
of a factory installed in-dash GPS unit with a big screen, pushbuttons
and external antennas, but those babies still burn your wallet
for $1,500 to $3,000 depending on what new car make and model
you buy, and they're not a universal car option yet. But this
is HandHeld Computing, not Car & Driver. Try taking your expensive
in-dash GPS out of your car and carrying it around in your hand,
for a walking or hiking jaunt. Forget it÷it's bolted in and part
of the dash, just like your car stereo or gauges. When using the
Zodiac with the SDIO GPS card, what you give up in screen size,
you make up with total portability.
Besides
the smaller screen, the chief downside to using a Zodiac as a
one piece, whole USA, in-car GPS solution is that, as of this
writing, there's no 12 volt DC adapter for the Zodiac, and with
its screen on all the time and using NavCard's voice prompting,
a Zodiac's internal battery is good for about an hour or two and
that's it. This is okay for around-town hops, but useless for
long trips. Until Tapwave sells a car cord/charger, your only
solution to the battery problem is to buy a DC to AC power inverter.
Plug that into your car's 12 volt DC outlet, bring your Zodiac's
AC adapter and charging cable with you, and you've solved that
problem too.
To
sum up:
Mapopolis' NavCard is a stunning achievement in data compression.
Packing every road in the lower 48 states onto a card the size
of a postage stamp is amazing. It has no equal. With a different
choice of POIs and POI navigation it would be just about perfect.
I should mention that Mapopolis also offers the $99 TripCard that
contains the same NAVTEQ data and capabilities, but does not have
GPS support, voice navigation or automatic re-routing. Further,
both cards are available either with the whole US or with just
a region loaded.
iGolf
Tech's SDIO GPS card driver finally brings cable-free, one piece
GPS navigation to Palm owners, and using it with NavCard in a
Tapwave Zodiac is a joy. The utility of that combo suffers only
from the lack of a Zodiac DC car charger, so for longer trips,
put an AC power inverter on your shopping list as well.
It
would, of course, be nice to have GPS and the whole US on a Palm
other than the Zodiac, but that will have to wait a bit.
÷Harv Laser
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