The week of March 12th in My Digital Life

This week I am in Seattle and Redmond for the Microsoft MVP Summit. Today I had a meeting in downtown Seattle and used Windows Live Search WLS with the Transystem, Inc. i-Blue 737 Bluetooth GPS in my pocket (see my review here). It worked very well walking down the street, however the route feature is for driving rather than walking so I adjusted accordingly. A walking routing option would be very handy. I was very impressed with the signal's stability. The GPS pointer was a little jumpy from the jostling of the receiver in my pocket but the position was accurate.

This week I am also reviewing the Blueant V12 Bluetooth headset. It has an LCD which displays caller id and number history. The call quality so far is excellent even in a noisy environment.

I installed the latest beta of OneCare on Vista this weekend which integrates fully with Vista's security center. It works well. I also installed it on my Thinkpad X41 Tablet. I am having a problem with an old version Cisco's VPN client, but all of my forum research seems to be pointing to the VPN client.

My review of the Spb Shell is on pocketnow.com here.

This week I will report anything of interest from the MVP Summit and work on:

• My review of SPB Software Brain Evolution software
• My review of Blueant's V12 Bluetooth headset

Comments

[Chris]

Per your recommendation I also purchased the iBlue 737 GPS receiver a week ago (primarily because the price was great and Amazon was running out of stock). Since then I have been looking for a decent turn-by-turn navigation software for the MDA and wondered if you had any experience with one. I tried out smart2go, but found the upgrade price a little outrageous for a beta product that also crashed on me 3 times while using the free mapping functionality. Microsoft Live is great for ordinary mapping and the GPS integration is great (the UI is a little clunky with having to close multiple windows when selecting a location and then mapping), but otherwise it's a great product. But again, it's lacking turn-by-turn real time navigation functionality. Just wondered if you had any experience worth noting.
Thanks!

[Stephen Skarlatos]

Hi Chris,

This is something I have been struggling with as well. When I got my first wired Pharos GPS receiver for my XDA, I got a bundle which included the Pharos Ostia navigation software. However I can't recommend it. I have upgraded twice but I have given up. Although it has worked for me, it is not an intuitive piece of software and the maps are just ok. From all my research I have been leaning towards Tom Tom, but the MDA is slightly underpowered to run even with overclocking. So I am waiting for T-Mobile's forthcoming MDA replacement to take the plunge I am hearing April/May although nobody is saying which HTC product they have chosen.

I am trying to get a trial of the Nokia software to review how well it works. You are right charging for a beta is pretty bad.