SatNav Shoes: Navigate the City on Foot

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Navigating the city on foot can be tricky, sure an iPhone may help but who wants to walk around with a shiny new phone in your hand just waiting to be stolen? How about a pair of shoes with GPS built in, complete with step by step guidance. The left shoe holds all the gadgetry: under the tongue you will find the control unit. Just enter your starting and destination postcodes and you're off.

There are two ways Sat Nav Shoes give you directions. An LED DNav Bubble on the front acts as a visual guide and you’ll hear a beep when you are heading in the wrong direction. The heel of the shoe is equipped with waterproof speakers or for those with wireless headsets, bluetooth.

It doesn't look like the shoes will track your trip (that would be a feature that would be like to see) but we still think its a great idea.

You can buy them now via Firebox.com for £129 - there is no word on availability beyond the UK at the moment.

US Census Drop's PDA, Adopts Pencil and Paper

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Sometimes it is easy to overlook how good 'old' style technologies are. For example, pencil and paper has automatic 100% handwriting recognition, is zoomable, viewable from any angle in any light conditions and is compatible with any number of filing systems.

As such the US Census Bureau will be ditching its PDAs in favor of paper and pencil for the 2010 census. To be honest this makes sense on a number of levels.

Sure it goes against our natural urge to geo-tag, document and process data on site via an edge connection, preferably while streaming video, but sometimes its easier to go old school.

We are just looking at our gps pda enabled mapping system for a campus route finder and thinking it might be better to use paper, a pencil and a compass - this could catch on.

Picked up via Engadget..

Garmin nuvifone - A Phone for Neogeographers?

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Garmin is the market leader in GPS devices, its GPS based hardware is well respected in the industry and now they are entering the mobile phone market.

The 'Nuvifone' seems to take on the iPhone with its touch screen navigation and adds the all important GPS capability.

Garmin view the phone as 'the ultimate multi-tasker’ and the “first of its kind to integrate premium 3.5G mobile phone capability with an internet browser, data connectivity, personal messaging, and personal navigation functions in one device.”

The Nokia N95 was the first to mass market GPS with its built in functionality but with a slow fix time and a slightly 'clunky' interface it has fallen out of favour, at least with us, as it is too cumbersome to use.

Of note is the built in ability to geotag images and upload to services such as Flickr via either 3G or Wifi.

With the respected name of Garmin behind the phone we are expecting good things from the GPS - this could be the ultimate Neogeographers phone?

Release is due in the third quarter of 2008, full details can be found via the Garmin page.