Cost-effective GPS trackers

Having been on a road trip to Lapland in the summer and used a lot of different ways to track my location and share content (I know, I still need to write about it), Both Nicola and I are going to the Ice Hotel in Swedish Lapland for 4 days.

The main issue we had was keeping our mobiles logging our trip. They lost the satellites fairly often (and in the case of my N95 didn’t get much signal to begin with) and of course with GPS turned on constantly they didn’t really last that long on battery. So for this next trip I’ve decided to look at a dedicated device for location tracking.

After looking at Garmin and other devices I found two good possibilities which were around £50:

i-gotU (GT-120 & GT-200)
i-gotU

The site for this device is pretty, and they have some nice software for geotagging photos sending to Flickr/Picasa, although it’s Windows-only. Other than that, it’s pretty hard to find information about the devices, compare the differences in specifications and even to see how many points it can record or how long the battery lasts and how to recharge it.

The device looks really nice though and for the average user it would be a great, small tracker to fit in your pocket. Especially at £45.

GlobalSat DG-100
GlobalSat DG0-100

Not quite as pretty as the i-gotU, but has lots of details about the huge battery life (37 hours at 10 second interval captures) and more status indicators on the front of the device, as well as a hardware interval selector on the side.

Since the shops I looked at didn’t have any i-gotU in stock, and for the known brand of GlobalSat, I decided on the DG-100.

For this trip I’m planning on doing most of my photography using my Canon 350D SLR and Canon MD235 MiniDV camcorder, so there won’t be much live content apart some rare photos from my N95 and some Jaiku updates.

After the trip I’ll make sure to bookmark some time to posting what I used, as well as how they coped in the freezing temperatures.

Google Latitude – Their take on Nokia Friend View

Google Latitude allows users to share their location with their friends using their mobiles.  Powered by Google Maps, Latitude uses the same ‘My Location’ mechanism, so it will show your location to the nearest mile if it can’t get an accurate fix from the device’s GPS.  This also means that Latitude should be able to be used on devices which don’t have in-built GPS, which lowers the barrier to entry for many potential users.

Users can also add an iGoogle widget, which gives the same ‘tracking’ ability directly from the iGoogle homepage.

Quite a while ago, Nokia created Friend View, a very similar application, but focusing on support Nokia devices.  Google’s attempt covers a whole range of devices including S60, Android (of course) and will soon support iPhone, which is sure to raise the profile of the new service above Friend View.

If you have a barcode reader on your phone, you can use the code below to download the application.

Google Latitude

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