gps

Find friends easily with Space-time app

There are any number of apps that can help you pinpoint a friend's location, but they all have one thing in common: they require that friend to have the same app installed and running, and usually to sign up with YAS (Yet Another Service).

And don't forget, it's a two-way street: you have to run the app yourself, and leave it running all the time -- a pretty big drain on the ol' smartphone battery.

Enter Space-time for iOS, a clever cross-platform locator app that runs only when you need it to and requires no installation or … Read more

After 23 years, Garmin reaches 100 million devices sold

Garmin's GPS devices have reached a significant milestone.

The company announced today that it has now sold 100 million Garmin devices worldwide since its founding in 1989. The first Garmin device was sold in 1991, the company said, and took six years to reach its one-millionth sale. By 2007, it had sold 25 million devices. Now, just five years later, it has tripled that figure.

Based on the data provided by Garmin, sales are accelerating. In fact, Garmin acknowledged that much in a separate earnings release today, saying that it sold 2.7 million GPS units during the first … Read more

CoPilot Live Premium GPS - USA

With so many navigation apps available, many for free, it may be difficult to imagine paying for one. But ALK Technologies makes a reasonable case for its CoPilot Live Premium app. Its most compelling feature are the full set of maps it includes, making it possible to navigate without a data connection.

Most people using a smartphone for navigation will be doing 95 percent of their driving in an area with data coverage. But the most critical times for a good navigation app come out on back roads, far away from cell towers. Likewise, high data roaming charges in foreign … Read more

Hands on with Scout by Telenav's HTML5 navigation

Getting (or sending) turn-by-turn driving directions is now as simple as clicking a link in a text message or e-mail with Telenav's new Scout navigation Web app and your phone's HTML5 browser. OK, so there are more steps than just that one, but it's still a remarkably simple process.

Simply visit Scout.me with any browser and search the city of your choice for something to do, somewhere to eat, or somewhere to sleep. Destinations are organized into the main categories of Things to do, Food and Drink, Events, and Places to stay, with multiple subcategories for … Read more

Does it still make sense to buy a GPS?

A GPS is one of those things I don't know how we as a society ever lived without. Like Google. And cell phones. And Nutella crepes.

Back in the stone age of satellite-assisted navigation (I'm talking 2003, around the time my thoroughly inept book on GPS technology came out), you could expect to pay hundreds of dollars for a slow, bulky, cumbersome device that might get you from point A to point B -- provided you didn't so much as think about visiting point C. (Points D and E were right out.)

What a difference a decade … Read more

CoPilot Live Premium Europe for iPhone

iPhone-compatible 'smart watch' raises $100K in two hours

The concept of Pebble's "smart watch" is simple -- a clean interface running useful apps and wrapped in a fashionable watch interface. The key to Pebble's inevitable success will be its apps.

According to its Kickstarter page, the Pebble E-Paper Watch will ship with the capability to run several apps using some of the functionality of your iPhone or Android smartphone via Bluetooth connection.

For example, bikers can get information about their speed, distance, and total time by using the GPS capabilities of their connected smartphone. Runners will also get a similar functionality.… Read more

Rumored: Transformer Prime to get GPS Band-Aid

According to a post on the Transformer Prime XDA Developers forum, Asus will soon release an attachment for the Prime that will "address the GPS function and be a fully usable GPS that will lock onto many satellites and keep their lock with Wi-Fi active."

The post goes on to indicate that the proposed dongle will be offered for free and will arrive in mid-April.

Though the original post was copied from an e-mail exchange with a purported Asus rep, no official announcement has been made by Asus.

Back in Feburary, we gave Asus the chance to address … Read more

Superradiant laser is super stable

Physicists have engineered a significantly more stable laser, an advance which could lead to better atomic clocks for equipment, such as GPS satellites, and physics experiments.

Researchers at the JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, have built a prototype of a superradiant laser using 1 million rubidium atoms. Their work was described in a paper published in Nature yesterday.

Using a different structure than traditional lasers, the researchers believe they can build a laser which is 100 to 1,000 times more stable. These lasers could be used in … Read more

TomTom releases fix for 'leap year' bug

Satellite navigation maker TomTom has pushed out an update to fix a software glitch that left customers worldwide complaining about not being able to find their location.

The problem, which began on Saturday, meant the sat-navs failed to get a GPS position. Instead, users saw a gray screen or a message saying the GPS signal was poor.

Today the Dutch company apologized for the glitch, which it said was caused by a "leap year" bug in the GPS receiver software from a third-party supplier.

"A software update fixing the issue is now available via MyTomTom," it … Read more