Drivers in the UK have taken trust of their navigation units to the extreme. Twice in the space of the last two weeks, there are reports of British drivers taking serious risks because they trust the info displayed on the small screen more than what they see through their windshield. In the most recent case, drivers passing through the village of Luckington have found themselves landing in the River Avon, by following a GPS-recommended route that pointed to a bridge that has been closed for a week. Despite warning signs on both sides of the road, and nothing but water straight ahead, local villagers have found themselves pulling an average of two cars a day out of the river for the past week. “When you ask what happened, they say, ‘My sat-nav told me it was this way,’” one resident told The Times. Meanwhile, the village of Crackpot has had to deal with drivers whose navigation systems have directed them to the edge of a cliff with a hundred-foot drop. So far, there have been no serious injuries, but drivers have found themselves stranded on a rocky path. “It’s only a matter of time before something happens,” said one resident.

Source: Marc Perton - Engadget

Tracey Capen from PC World Canada provides review on Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006.

Streets and Trips 2006 is easy to use and complete but it has issues similar to in-car navigation systems: lack of usability tools.

Microsoft’s $150 Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS Locator is quite a bit simpler to use than the Delorme software. Once you become familiar with the icons in the toolbar, getting directions and finding services is relatively fast and easy. Click on “Find Nearby Places”, and a well-organized list of service and location categories (restaurants, ATMs, museums) pops up. Choose the ones that interest you, and you’ll see a category-specific icon for each place on the map.

The procedure for adding or removing categories for display is a bit cumbersome. It’s also a bit annoying that you cannot simply type in “Starbucks” and have all local Starbucks shops appear on the map. As well, the data probably isn’t as complete as that of online mapping services: I found a relatively new neighbourhood Peet’s Coffee using Google Local and Yahoo Local Maps, but the shop was missing in Streets and Trips 2006. On the plus side, searches seem lightning-fast.

Streets and Trips gives you a few interesting tools for planning your driving vacation. You can specify the times of day you wish to drive (which the software then uses in its calculations), obtain travel time and trip cost estimates (including gas) and get construction alerts along your planned route.

You can also save your trip details as a web page–to toss up on your road-trip blog, for instance. But I found no way to save favourite locations or addresses, and the updated construction-info wizard that is supposed to pull the latest reports from the web failed to note that an exit near work has been closed for months.

The small GPS receiver’s USB cable measures 6 feet, long enough to reach comfortably from the dash to a notebook in the front seat. Directions were generally good: in my test the software created the best route from point A to point B and back again. But, the in-car navigation capability was disappointing, as poor voice prompts and the lack of automatic redirection after a wrong turn (a standard feature in most GPS navigation systems) put me off course.

Bottom line: This package is great if you want an easy-to-use mapping system in your PC, with a vacation’s worth of routes and services. But, as an in-car navigation system, Streets and Trips 2006 lacks key usability tools.

Fugawi GPS Mapping Software

Navman today announces their new Jupiter 30 GPS receiver, capable of 66 second cold start TTFF, -159dBm signal locks, and 1,118mph max velocity, enabling GPS tracking indoors and in “impossible locations.” We’re not sure why these supposed locations weren’t previously possible to track with the SiRFstar IIIs that a ton of people already have, but hey, if it works better than the competition in real life than it does on paper then that’s what counts. Now, get that chipset in packages as small as Pharos’s iGPS-500 and you’ll really have something.

Source: by Ryan Block - Engadget