GPS on my HTC Pocket PC Phone

We had a thread going around my team last week talking about the different GPS solutions people are using. My teammates are all road warriors, with most of us being on the road at least 50% of the time, sometimes more. My colleague, Kevin, has been using TomTom Nav 6 for the Pocket PC for a while and was full of praise for it. We chatted about it and he convinced me that it would more than pay for itself on a “cold dark rainy night when you can’t find your hotel”. He then proceeded to tell ghost stories and scared me into thinking about buying it.

I have a built-in GPS system on my car, but that’s not much help to me when I’m in New Jersey and my car is at Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta, so I decided to bite the bullet and buy it. I bought the DVD version from Buy.com and got what I think was at a pretty good price.

Installation was a breeze, easily installed TomTom on my laptop. I already had a 1GB SD card so I selected to install it on my pocket PC with maps for GA, NC, SC, NY, NJ and CT which all together took about 230mb. I still have room for more maps but I’ll add them as needed. They had a selection of voices and I opted for the “English (United Kingdom) Jane” voice. Nice to hear the familiar accent telling me where to go in NJ, although I do get the urge to drive on the left listening to Jane tell me in her very proper English accent, “Enter the motorway”. The phone connected to the bluetooth receiver automagically once it had a GPS signal.

I was a little concerned as I approached my hotel this afternoon, as it said I only had a mile to go and I was bang smack in the middle of residential housing with no commercial or retail in sight. So much so I had to double take on the address I had selected to make sure I was going to the right place. For a few moments I cursed Kevin with three feet of snow this weekend (he lives in Minnesota…it could happen), then out of the blue there was the hotel, totally alone, in a residential neighborhood. Go figure!

This application is a yet another I’m running on my HTC phone that makes it impossible for me to leave home without it. Its my email, calendar, contacts, Ms. Pacman, video and audio mobile media center and NOW my GPS system!!! Life will never be the same and I will never be lost, for now.

By the way all you Minnesotans, don’t worry, I immediately called off the snow curse on Kevin so if you have barbeque plans this weekend you’re still good to go.. :-)