I love getting toys for Christmas:
Chateau Steelypips is now GPS-enabled. That’s from our drive home last night (GIMPed to within an inch of its life, because the light level was really low)– bonus points for anyone who can identify where it was taken. It’s a Garmin c340, for those who want specs with their gadget photos.
So, how does it work? Well, we’ve used it on exactly one drive, from my parents’ house to here, and there’s really only one way to go. At one point, the display said “Turn in 87 miles,” which tells you just how hard it had to work on that trip…
The directions it gave were exactly the same as our normal route, so that didn’t really tell us anything. We may end up confounding it this weekend when we go to Kate’s parents’ place outside Boston, or maybe not. At any rate, it will be a better test.
The one probem we saw was that it identified Nott St. in Schenectady as “County Route 6,” which was less helpful than it might have been. It told us to turn in the right place, but the name it gave didn’t match local usage or signage, which might’ve been distressing if we hadn’t known right where we were.
Other than that, all I can really say is that it’s kind of cool to see the grid of unseen streets to either side, as you move along the map. I may play with it running errands today (I may even run errands for the specific purpose of playing with it…), and see what other things it can do.