Quote:
Originally posted by kamrantaz
hello, im after my 1st PDA and have fallen in love with the NX70 but would like to add GOS in the future and would like to know how well palms are supported? and by whom as it seems like a minefield and im completly lost.
Everyone is telling me to stay away from Palm OS for GPS but i really want to get an NX70 as it has everything i need bar GPS but has the CF slot i want.
Can anyone help because i really want to join the gang  |
Your friends are correct to some degree because to-date, there is no support for any CF-based GPS for the PalmOS PDA. Partly this is because there's been so few PalmOS devices with a CF slot. The NX series is a rather odd-bird in this regard. Even more odd is that Sony chose not to support anything in that CF slot except for their WiFi card.
However, the NX series is an exceptional platform for GPS because of the large screen. And indeed, Mapopolis (
www.mapopolis.com) is a really great app. I bought the non-GPS version of it on the strength of the review and love it.
The way to get a GPS on the NX series are summarized as follows.
1. You can get Sony's only car-cradle/GPS unit. It only supports the NX73,80 and TG50. From the reviews I've seen of it, the included software is pretty bad. See here for a review:
http://www.cliesource.com/forums/sh...r+cradle+review
2. You can get an external GPS unit that outputs NMEA and use a cable/adapter to connect it the NX. This works for all NX and I presume by extension, even the TG and UX. There are various vendor for this including:
http://www.thesupplynet.com/ http://pc-mobile.net/
(Note that I've never bought from either of them so don't take this as an endorsement of them.)
3. A variation of option 2 is to use BlueTooth instead of a cable. Assuming you're in North America, you're going to need Sony's BlueTooth MemoryStick since none of the North-American NX have BT built-in.
Finally, some practical advice from my 2 months of Mapopolis on my NX70:
1. Mapopolis' greatest flaw is its memory requirement. It's actually a PalmOS problem. Mapopolis requires any map that it is using to reside in memory. You can keep an archive of maps (say, all of North America) on a VFS-volume (a MemoryStick or a CF card) but when you use it, it must be copied from VFS to main memory. With the NX70's paltry 11Mb, it's hard to have more than one or two maps in memory at any time and still hold other app/data. You run across this situation when you navigate long-distance from one major centre to another major centre because you require the maps for the source and destination as well as maps for the connecting highways. Thankfully, this is not a frequent use-case.
2. If you're planning to use your NX/GPS combo in a car, you've got some unique useability problem. You're going to need a cradle/mount of some form but that is a relatively simple problem. More intractable is the lack of voice prompting. Because of Sony's proprietary API on the NX, Mapopolis can't provide voice prompting as you'd expect (and supported by Mapopolis on non-CLIE). I should mention that Sony's own car-cradle GPS does support voice prompting but see above.
That's the summary of my research into GPS on the NX.
George
NX-70 and GPS 
Linear Mode
