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Re-activateWalking the long corridors and event halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center, trying to find specific booths to learn about the GPS products, it's hard to escape the irony that I'm navigating with crumpled paper maps. Among the products that have stood out to me is the new Mio DigiWalker C720t ($599). Introduced in September, after our last group portable GPS navigation test, this Mio device includes real-time traffic updates; text-to-speech driving instructions; enhanced Bluetooth capabilities that allow hands-free calling with a variety of Bluetooth-equipped cell phones; and an "industry-leading" 12 million points of interest (POIs) in its memory. (I've not had a chance to count them to verify this claim.)
The really interesting feature, though, is an integrated two-megapixel camera that can be used to chronicle your travels. The GPS-enabled camera can "geotag" photographs by including location coordinates, allowing you to later navigate back to these "PhotoPOIs." (We have tested unit that also had this feature, the Navman iCN 700.) They can also be e-mailed to friends and family members who can use the coordinates to find other GPS devices. This opens up intriguing possibilities for recording a vacation, trip planning, and even scavenger hunts akin to geocaching. Even without shooting photos, images from Flickr and Google Earth can be used to customize the POI database. In total this phenomenon of connecting images to locations is huge, with more than 2 million photos geotagged this month at Flickr.
On a more practical note, business card recognition software allows you to automatically input data into your contacts list by simply taking a photo of a card. This is a feature I could get a lot of use out of this week in Vegas.
--Bob Huerster
Discuss portable GPS navigation systems in the Cars forums.
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