Navman & Series 60

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No, it's probably unlikely to help you in the foothills of Colombia, nor are the Police and Army likely to be talking about it in private talks (a rather T3G in joke there!), however, at £170 you could get yourself from A to B using your Nokia series 60 smartphone. You've got the handset anyway, you carry it about all the time, so why fork out for some generic sat-nav that you need to hide away every time you stop the car! I know friends with tomtom on their 6680's and it runs very nicely, and considering the screen size, it's quite useable. If anyone takes the plunge and invests please let us know how you get on!

Navman's Mobile Travel Assist S60 navigation system for Nokia N series phones is a pretty standard GPS solution, comprising an RS-MMC card that houses the maps and a Bluetooth endowed GPS receiver.

Priced at £169, it boasts a unique facility in the inclusion of Navpix, a software tweak that enables users to tag images they take on the phone's camera with GPS data. So a user could snap an image of a favourite bar and when they wanted to return to it just click on the image and get directions. It's a little gimmicky, but it works well.

Another neat twist is the integration of web information, which enables users to access online data to find a nearby restaurant and get the latest travel information. It isn't always accurate - one of my "local" restaurants turned out to be nearly 200 miles away - but it is very useful information for travellers. The rest of the system is standard sat nav for mobile fare.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/inn...861153,00.html

Owners of Series 60 smartphones already had plenty to be smug about, and now Navman’s just made them insufferably happy by announcing a sat-nav bundle that brings its NavPix tech to mobiles for the first time.

The (deep breath) Mobile Travel Assist S60 Edition packs NAVTEQ’s maps onto a miniSD card - you get the choice of 512MB UK & Ireland or 1GB Western Europe cards – and couples it with a Bluetooth GPS receiver.

As you can see above,[3g-g EDIT: or below in our case ) there are two GPS widgets. The lollipop-shaped B20 doesn’t have a battery and is powered solely by your cigarette lighter, while the B10 is a more conventional self-powered unit that you can carry around with you.

The kit serves up all the usual sat-nav treats that you’d find on a dedicated GPS device including a speedy Sirf Star III chipset, real-time traffic reports and over 1.25 million Points of Interest, but the really cool feature is the NavPix tech.

Like the iCN750 navigator, it attaches photos taken with your camphone with the destinations GPS co-ordinates and turns them into ‘NavPix’. Having the feature on a mobile, though, takes it to another level: you can, for example, take a picture of a restaurant you’re in, text it to a fellow NavPix user and they’ll get directed straight there, even dodging traffic jams on the way.

If you’re planning to be a bewildered tourist in a major European city this autumn, you’ll also be pleased to hear that Navman has teamed up with Lonely Planet and made some handy downloadable Navpix’s that feature the series’ expert info.

Visit its site now and you’ll find hundreds of tourist haunts for cities such as Paris, Milan and Madrid, which you can suck down your broadband connection for free.

http://www.stuffmag.co.uk/hotstuffar...asp?de_id=2282