A friend of mine lent me his GPS handheld unit while he’s away, and I’m going to try it out for the next few days. I’ve been thinking about purchasing a GPS unit for a while, and I have an upcoming trip that would be a good testbed for it. It’s a cute little unit called the Garmin Geko, and looks nice and simple to use. Unfortunately, I’ve been in the subway and the office all day, so I can’t seem to get it to work yet. From what I’ve seen, it’s probably because I haven’t done something right yet. I’ll get around to reading the manual eventually.
I’ll take it for a spin around town, but I suspect that I’ll end up getting something with a map, perhaps something like the eTrex. Still simple, but with an 8MB memory. I may fall for an impulse buy if I find something on sale.
One of the things I don’t like is that these things still use serial connections. Nothing I have in the way of computers has a serial port any more, and that just means a proprietary cable – I can’t just hook it up to any old computer.
I’ll do a bit of a walk and try and figure out how it works, and let you know how things go… If I can get it to work.