Smartphone GPS Software

Review by Charley Martel:

I bought this to replace a CoPilot Bluetooth GPS receiver that is suffering from a dying battery. I intended to use it only with my Sprint PPC-6700 and the CoPilot software. However, after owning this for a couple of days, I am changing my plans.

This device is both a bluetooth hands-free device and a GPS receiver. The speaker is loud. I used it to make a call to Garmin customer service where I found that I was entitled to an upgrade to Garmin 2008 maps (the unit shipped with maps from 2006) free. The Garmin software has tons of POI and the maps are adequate. You also can use free service, Garmin Online to obtain real time traffic alerts. Be warned that this service opens a data call on your phone, which unless you are on an unlimited plan could get expensive real fast (I didn’t notice the open connection for over two hours). The maps come on a 2GB mini (NB!) SD card with an SD adapter. I don’t like the Garmin interface as much as CoPilot, I find I really miss the test-to-speech capability. However, at the current Amazon price, the software is just about free.

The bonus feature that this thing has, which has pleased me so is that it also fits and pairs with the Nokia N800 Internet tablet. It’s a tight squeeze, but once in there it looks great and the free maps provided in the Nokia OS 2008 make a nice “add-on” GPS device. In fact in a test, I had the Garmin paired with both my PPC-6700 running CoPilot and the N800 running its map program for over 6 hours without a hitch. During the phone call I mentioned above the nice lady at Garmin customer service told me the Mobile 20 would only pair with one device at a time! The unit comes with four “charging” adapters, but the included mini-USB won’t charge my PPC-6700. Neither will the enclosed “small” Nokia adapter fit my N800. But the folks at Garmin are sending me the right one for free.

The cons of this unit are the the mount is kind of on the small side and of course, there’s no battery. Then there’s the what do you do with it when you get to the mall question. With an N800, my brick like PPC-6700 and now this I guess I’ll have to think of something (“Charlie? You’re NOT wearing Cargo Pants.”). One thing’s for sure, I am NOT buying a murse.

Review by Sal R:

I was shopping for a GPS system for my car for a few months before I decided to go with this because I already had a Palm Treo that this would be compatible with, it had built in bluetooth, and came with all the software. This sounded like a great bundle because it was much less expensive then some of the other GPS systems that included everything that this did. However after using this approximately 2 times, I found it hard to connect to the bluetooth and when I did the maximum highest volume was hard to hear even with all the windows rolled up. On one of the two occassions using the GPS it sent my Palm Treo into an endless cycle of reseting and turning on and reseting again. I tried to do a hard reset on my phone after this to stop this cycle from occuring but unfortunately I could not get it to stop. I had to goto my local phone dealer and have them take a look at my Treo, they could not figure it out either, so they replaced it with a new Treo (thanfully I pay extra for phone insurance each month).

I ended up returning this item after that because I did not want it to keep causing problems with my phone but even if that didn’t happen I still didn’t like not hearing my phone calls or even hearing the turn by turn directions, which was a pretty good part of this package, with the exception that my female voice directions stuttered…

Review by Regular Guy:

I do a fair amount of travelling in my business and have used some of the in car navigation systems that are in the rental cars I get. Mobile 7 is every bit as good and in many ways a whole lot better. Probably the biggest benefit for me when I am going to a place I’ve never been to before, is how easily it is to find what I am looking for and then have Mobile 7 direct me right to that place. I have a Nokia 6682 (that I purchased here for with a CIngular contract) and sync it with Outlook. Every one of my contacts is in my phone and can be called up to navigate to. All I have to do is scroll down to their address select them, and BOOM I get easy to hear voice instructions to drive right there.

Since it’s in my phone and portable, we’ve gotten in the habit of taking it on family trips too. It’s great to find a place to eat while driving, or the nearest Starbucks for my wife no matter where are in the US. My 6 year old loves the English accent when we choose that voice for directions, and she is loud enough and clear enough that he can listen to the directions as well sitting in the back of our minivan. He’s named her Abby, and we now ask Abby for directions when we go on our trips.

If you can’t tell already, this gadget has become one of the must have items in our family right up there with the microwave, TiVo and satellite radio. Freinds of ours that drive with us feel the same way after one trip. Do yourself a favor and get one of these, you will wonder how you ever lived without it!

Review by Keith Henrickson:

Okay.. I’m not even sure where to start. So, I’ll start where the author does in chapter 2. At random points. And I will switch threads of thought like a rabid ferret on caffeine, just like the author. Oh, wait, no, I want you to GET something out of this review, so I will try and be clear.

I’ve made it through 2.5 chapters of this train wreck of a book, so maybe it gets better. In chapter 2, he obstensably shows you how to build an iPhone app with Interface Builder. However, it’s not complete. He says things like, “Set the buttons correctly, and proceed to the next section.” Of course, he doesn’t tell you what “correctly” means. And he does have some goal in mind. He jumps between points of view. And ends up with a program that’s not functional. No full source provided. When I wrote in to complain about this, they said, “Just download the full source from our website.” I did. It doesn’t include source for the program in Chapter 2. It starts at Chapter 3.

Moving along to Chapter 3, it gets better. The first program, HelloView (a simple ‘load and do nothing’ program actually works. The second program, it’s obvious he never TRIED it before. He puts two different classes into the same source file. Not great style to encourage, but, we all get lazy and it’s a small program. As soon as you move the cursor over the old UIView variable declaration, the entire XCode IDE spins to 100% CPU usage and locks up (which is 100% reproducable). This doesn’t happen if you put the classes in separate files. That’s not a bug with this book, per se, but he does lead you down the garden path into exercising a bug in XCode. Again, it suggests he never tested his own code.

Now, that’s as far as I’ve gotten, and I bought it on Sunday.

Review by Mark Twain:

Horrible horrible book. Rushes through the basics in a very confusing way. He uses words instead of pictures or screenshots to try to convey what you should be seeing on your screen, or looking for. XCode can get very cluttered very easily so pictures would be much more descriptive than words (a picture is worth 1000 words to be exact!). There are many typos and errors. There aren’t many iPhone books out currently, and this is near the bottom of the bunch. I own them all. This book is more like one of O’Reilly’s “Nutshell” books, maybe useful to a certain few people but not terribly comprehensive. I feel like O’Reilly just wanted to get an iPhone book out ASAP, without really focussing on usefulness or ease of reading, and not proofreading very carefully.