May 2007, Week 3 -- Where Am I Now?

   "The beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom, as the jungle shadows fall." -- Cole Porter

   What's hot? GPS, that's what's hot. That stands for Global Positioning System, and what it means is you may not know where you are, but the spy in the sky does.

   There are dozens of GPS locators on the market right now, but the one getting the buzz is the TomTom Go 910 (tomtom.com). That's because of the beautiful color screen: 2 by 3 1/2 inches and remarkably sharp. You get a 3-D view of where you are and where you should be heading. If you're annoyed by the voice directing you to your destination, you can download the voice of comedian John Cleese for a one-time charge of about $10, other voices for about $6. You can also listen to music or view photos.

   That's the good news. The bad news is the price, around $450, and then there's the competition -- lots and lots of competition. The biggest competition comes from Garmin, which is probably the leading maker of GPS receivers and has several models.

   Most of Garmin's GPS receivers are designed with the expectation that they will be used in a vehicle. They can also be removed and carried around. Note: The TomTom is too heavy and bulky for easy handheld use, so it's best left mounted in a car. Most of these units can also be used with a cell phone, meaning you can dial with your cell phone and connect through the GPS unit, talking and listening as you go. This makes cell phone use hands-free.

   The Garmin Nuvi 660 is probably the best unit for moving between car and pocket. It's lightweight and has a display that equals the TomTom for size and clarity. The price was a stiff $640 when we searched the Web, but the maps cover North America and Puerto Rico, and you can get others for Europe, Asia and South America, along with built-in translators. You can use voice commands to ask for locations and voice commands when you want to turn it off. The TomTom has maps for these areas as well as for Australia and South Africa.

   Blackberry users can get the TeleNav service for the Blackberry 7500 or 7100i, powered by Sprint or Nextel, for $10 a month. This is just the edge of the wedge as additional competition will be coming from cell phone makers, some of whom are already selling GPS-enabled phones, again not cheap.

   In all of these cases, the quality of the maps is an important issue. Cheap maps can have lots of mistakes. Asking for directions to a "point of interest," like a hotel, restaurant or amusement site, might lead you to some abandoned building -- because that's where the POI, as they call it, was when the map was made.

   Verizon offers navigation software that can be downloaded to any phone that has the "get it now" feature, and these are becoming more common. The Nokia N95, recently available in the US, is its first phone with built-in GPS. At $732, it's one of the most expensive cell phones you can buy. It has a slot for adding memory cards, and this is the way all cell phones are going to have to go pretty soon, as it opens the door for plugging in powerful extra features already loaded onto the cards. The Nokia has so many features it's called a multimedia computer.

   All of this information is just a starter for one of the most active areas in electronics today. Careful, don't get lost.  

Internuts

Here are some tech support conversations we found at a Web site in Scotland: SiliconGlen.com. We couldn't resist.

1:

Tech Support: I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop.

Customer: OK.

Tech: Did you get a pop-up menu?

Customer: No.

Tech: OK, sir. Right-click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?

Customer: No.

Tech: OK, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up to this point?

Customer: Sure. You told me to write "click," but nothing happened.

2:

Customer: Hello. I can't get on the network.

Tech: OK, just read me your network asset number.

Customer: What is that?

Tech: It's a bar code label on the front of your computer.

Customer: OK. There's a big bar, then a little bar, then big bar, big bar ...

3:

Customer: The disk was stuck in the drive and wouldn't come out. So I got these pliers and tried to pull it out, but that didn't work either.

Tech: You did what, sir?

Customer: I got these pliers and tried to get the disk out, but it wouldn't budge. I just ended up cracking the plastic.

Tech: I don't understand, sir. Did you push the eject button?

Customer: No. I got a stick of butter and melted it and used a turkey baster to squirt the butter into the drive. That got the disk loose. Then I used the pliers, and it came out fine. I can't believe you would send me a disk that was broken and defective like that.