about me
photoblog
photo album
wheel'o'yum
Categories:
I finally received my GPS yesterday. And I love it!
It’s tiny, fits in the palm of your hand, but it has a very good color LCD screen and a superb speaker hidden inside that is actually rather loud, even while driving. I had to turn the volume down once.
So I’ve taken it for a couple test drives today. I selected a couple destinations in town that I wanted it to take me to. One the post office, which I obviously know where it’s at. And another one was the place where a friend needs to go vote on Tuesday, a place I wasn’t quite sure where it was.
And the polite male voice that I selected guided me turn by turn with directions such as “in 100 yards, turn right”, and right before 100 yards it would say “turn right.” Then it would say “turn left, in 20 yards you have reached your destination.” And sure enough, I was there. Then I would tell it “Navigate to HOME” (you get to tell it where your home is at), and it got me back to my house safely. Very, very cool.
The routes that it selected for me were not always the routes that I would take, but then that is because I’m familiar with this town. If I didn’t know this place any better, I would have been thrilled with how it guided me to my destination.
During one of my test drives, it asked me to turn onto a street that is closed due to construction. I quickly pushed the “roadblock” icon and it re-calculated the route on the spot. Unfortunately it asked me to get on another street that was also closed due to the same construction, so once again I selected “roadblock”. It simply said “when possible, turn around.” I did and it re-routed me once again to another street.
Finally, a piece of technology that is useful and will help me calm down when, such as on Tuesday, I gotta go to a city I am not familiar with and drive to a couple different locations.