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$100 GPS systems: Platform for e-books, too, someday?
December 27, 2008 | 10:49 am
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By David Rothman
Circuit City, Amazon and Tiger Direct here in the States are selling Tom Tom GPS systems for just $100 or so. Anyone familiar with the Tom Tom? I also wonder if, like cell phones, GPS systems could be platforms for e-books—for travels? Screens may well get larger. Are any existing models capable of doubling as e-book readers?
Related: Sales video from Tiger Direct. and Wikipedia entries on Tom Tom and GPS and automotive navigation systems.
Note: TeleRead’s Paul Biba is rather knowledgeable on GPSes, and I’ve suggested that he do a separate post if he has time, which he may or may not during the holidays.
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Comments:
TomTom makes excellent units and I can recommend any of them. Unfortunately none of the current unit out there can double as e-book readers without extensive hacking. TomTom software is Linux and is pretty much locked down. Almost all of the others are Windows CE and while you could probably put some form of reader on them you would have to be pretty technically inclined to get it to work.
David has asked me to do an off-topic post on low priced GPS units (since I am the main US reviewer for gpspassion.com, and I’ll try to post something in the coming week.
I have a TomTom One and love it (as much as one can love a GPS). It works great and has been very reliable. More important, however, is TomTom’s customer support. There were a couple of times when I couldn’t figure out how to use a feature and ended up calling for help (toll-free number). Each time the support person was patient, courteous, and knowledgeable, and wouldn’t rush off the telephone until he/she was satisfied that I understood what I needed to do. I have recommended the TomTom to everyone who asks — and even to some who don’t ask but who I think could use one.
There was a unit (not Tom-Tom) that I was reading about on engadget that had listed as one of the capabilities was reading ebooks (TXT format only).
A number of months ago, there was a Teleread article about RasterBook, a software program that converts HTML into multiple JPG files. I wrote a tutorial on using RasterBook with a not-so-smart cellphone (here: http://www.booksforabuck.com/writers/cellphone-ebook.html). I received a Garmin GPS unit for Christmas and was able to use RasterBook, along with a SD memory card, to read eBooks. I’m planning on writing a tutorial on this.
Image quality is really pretty good–definitely workable although not as sharp as ePaper.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com