the new toy I want

[chhotii]

I am skilled at neither driving nor navigating. Trying to do both at the same time... tends to get me in trouble.

Having experienced both a human passenger navigating, and Crash's dashboard-mounted GPS mapping 'bot, I prefer the 'bot. Yay for the triumph of Artificial Stupidity over Natural Intelligence.

What goes wrong having a friend navigate? Well, to illustrate, I could give a blow-by-blow account of how, in the process of trying to drive to dhs's house in Maryland, I drove into a ditch in Northern Virginia instead. But that would lead to pointless on-line bickering with the navigator. So we'll just move on from that.

So now I want this.

Now to look for comparison reviews... And the best price seems to be from costco.com; do I need a Costco membership to order from them?

Comments

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was just at a big meeting at Red Hat HQ and one of the guys there was singing the praises of this toy... had me kicking myself that I'd already just upgraded my Palm (to a Zire 71; I thought the builtin digicam was kinda cute).

If you enter ique in the search box at pricewatch (http://www.pricewatch.com) you'll see that you can actually beat Costco's price by mail order; Comp-U-Plus (http://www.compuplus.com) has the iQue for $425+$15 shipping.

The only drawback I've heard described about this thing is that standalone battery life is not great. This isn't an issue when you're using it as a car-mounted GPS, but it might be a consideration if you're using it as a plain-ole PDA as well...

ique as PDA

[totient]

I am sure that this thing is a smashing GPS. However, I am pretty sure that the actual design and manufacturing was done by some folks who also designed a rather fragile but feature-rich device at the end of the last century.

Put another way: Don't count on being able to put this thing in your pocket without a protective case.

[skreeky]

Yeh, my brother had a GPS navigation system for his laptop several years ago and it really truly sucked - I hadn't seriously thought about it since.

Then a couple of months ago, I was riding in one of those disgustingly over-featured SUV's with a friend, and she had some sort of on-board. I expressed my doubts, but we were in a part of town that I wasn't certain the best way onto 93. She insisted it would get us there. The thing had us there in what seemed like seconds via a route I didn't even know, and unlike my brother's, it actually told us about turns before they happened.

I was really impressed.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

yeah, the battery life is the only downside... if it uses the Palm universal connector, you can buy an off the shelf product that plugs in and supplies outside power on batteries...

you can also turn off any hardware features (the gps). same trick for palms with wifi and/or bluetooth or mp3 playback. hell, turning off the IR helps too. then you probably have a useful day to day palm.

does it come with street level maps? or is that another $100?

armor! see http://www.otterbox.com - they have generic otter boxes ($10 at ems/rei) or the special PDA armor. waterproof, ruggedized. yah.

special bonus the two: since you have a 480x320 screen now, you can get the palm planetarium program - which totally rocks - and supports the new resolution.

don't forget to tell mgrant - he lusts for one.

and congrats :>

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