Garmin listens to their users (the people that are making them money) and then markets the products that people want.

Look how many people are out there on the internet searching for free Garmin voices or free Garmin voice packs! I’m telling you - there’s lots of people out there looking for this kind of stuff and it is not easy to find anything.

Sure, if you’re going to disrespect the ancient and outdated copyright laws you’ll likely find some stuff on the torrent sites and the P2P networks - but you know the risks in doing that.

What Garmin did above all is listened to the market. Garmin developed a piece of software that allows you to make your own voices for Garmin GPS devices and they are giving it away for free.

You thought you were going to have to pay for something like that didn’t you?

You can download Garmin Voice Studio directly from the Garmin Web Site.

For those of you who think outside the box you’ll figure out that you’ll have no problem making any free Garmin GPS voice pack that you want to with this piece of software.

If you don’t have a Garmin yet - get with it! We suggest the new Garmin nüvi 1690 4.3-Inch Portable Bluetooth Navigator with nüLink! Services

See larger image Garmin nüvi 1690 4.3-Inch Portable Bluetooth Navigator with nüLink! Services (Electronics) List Price: Price Not Listed New From: Check Amazon For Pricing In Stock Used from: $249.99 In Stock

Lately, it seems that Trimble has been trying to break into the consumer GPS market by teaming up with some cellular service providers to offer software services to the cellular provider’s clients.

So far AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Blackberry, T Mobile, Sprint and Alltel Wireless have jumped on board with Trimble. Or maybe Trimble has jumped on board with them.

Trimble has created a new division of the company and called it Trimble Outdoors. With Trimble Outdoors you can plan outdoor trips and use your phone for GPS navigation, tracking your fitness performance, geocaching, and sharing your experiences with others. All of the applications are available on the Trimble Outdoors site, but having them isn’t going to be cheap!

Trimble offers three different software applications that are built with different activities in mind. You’re going to end up paying $5-$6 per month depending on the software application that you choose.

AllSportGPS - The AllSport GPS software application turns your cell phone into a full-featured GPS-enabled trainer and workout tracker for cycling, mountain biking, running, walking and other sports activities.

The AllSportGPS phone application in combination with the Trimble Outdoors web site provides you with a complete solution for tracking, analyzing and improving your fitness.

Trimble Outdoors - The Trimble Outdoors™ application lets you use your cell phone to find your way and document your trips for hiking, backpacking, fishing and other outdoor activities.

The phone application in combination with the Trimble Outdoors web site provides you with a complete solution for using your phone to find your way, creating multimedia trip journals that you can share, researching and planning trips, and sending your trips wirelessly to your phone.

Geocache Navigator - Geocache Navigator™ on your mobile phone offers you a fun and easy way to enjoy a hugely popular hide and seek game called geocaching (also known as “GPS treasure hunting”).

With Geocache Navigator™ you can geocache on-the-go. Leave behind your GPS device, cables, and paper printouts! It’s easy to use for beginners and powerful for advanced geocachers. Just grab your phone, seek and enjoy.

Don’t be surprised about Trimble trying to lock you into using their software product as they’re famous for doing this already with their GIS software products. When I bought my Juno ST I was surprised to learn that there was no useable GPS software on the device or the software disc that came with it that was of any real value to me.

So what are the alternatives? There’s actually a LOT of alternatives, many of which are much cheaper than what Trimble and partners are offering their packages for. But it depends a lot on your device too.

If you’re a Nokia user and your phone has GPS capabilities you can go over to the Nokia Sports Tracker web site and get yourself all hooked up over there.

Handheld, standalone GPS users can use Zone Five Software’s SportsTracks Software which will accept a wide variety of devices and all your information is kept on your PC and the software integrates with Google Earth so you can even “fly through” your route in 3D.
TrailGuru seems to still be in the startup stage but they seem to have a lot of potential. You can use their web site by uploading your tracks or use the site in conjunction with their iPhone application that’s available at the iPhone App Store.

For those of you who want to try Geocaching you’ll find that a Basic Membership on the Official Geocaching Web Site is free.

I’m thinking that Trimble should stick with the professional GIS software/hardware market because there’s not a real big chance that they’re going to keep up in the fast moving consumer GPS market with only a few pieces of software and nothing that’s completely their own.

It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be traveling in the USA, Thailand, Italy, France, India or Tahiti! Lonely Planet has a guide for just about everywhere.

Most Lonely Planet Travel Guides are less than $20 so hurry up and get your Lonely Planet Guidebook today!

One example of this type of service is the GyPSy Okanagan Wine Tour in British Columbia, Canada. You can rent a GPS device pre-programmed with a tour of the Okanagan Wine Making District. The guided tour has audio prompts that tell you where to go and when the point of interest comes into view - Sounds like a basic operation of the middle of the road Garmin Nuvi or TomTom Navigational GPS to me!

GyPSy Tours also has other tours available for western Canada - They’ve covered Banff, Jasper, some of Vancouver Island, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.

The GyPSy Tours can only be rented with a GPS device included and it will cost you about $220 for 7 days and when your done with the device you can drop it off at one of their drop-off locations in the area.

If you do some smart shopping you can get a pretty good Navigational GPS for $220 these days and if you shop around on Amazon.com you’ll be sure to find one that suits your needs in no time. With a little more searching on the internet you can set up your own tour in your GPS (that you get to keep) in no time - don’t forget that that’s what these devices were made for!

But if you still want to check out GyPSys Guided Tours you can find their web site at GyPSy Guide

We’re not sure on how long Garmin will leave the door open on getting their MapSource for free with no cracks or hacks so you’ll want to do this as soon as you read it.

The first part to getting your Free MapSource is to Download the Training Center.

Once you’ve downloaded the Training Center go ahead and install it on your machine. You can play around with it if you want to but really this is just opening the door into getting what you want for free.

After you have the MapSource Training Center installed you’ll want to Download the Update and install it.

You should now have the full blown and up-to-date MapSource!

First here’s a couple of sites with a lot of maps:

Map Center
Free Garmin GPS Maps

Here’s some more sites with specific location maps.

Australia - Tracks for Australia
Canada - Canadian ‘eh’ Topo Maps
Caribbean - This maps site has maps of Japan, Bermuda and Antarctica too.
China - Yunnan Explorer
Greece - Greece GPS Maps
Morocco - Maps of Morocco
New Zealand - The New Zealand Open GPS project
South America - Argentina and Uruguay with some more countries on the way.

If you don’t have it already you’ll need a utility to help you get your .img files to your Garmin GPS you can download Img2GPS to help you along with that.

Don’t forget that a lot of these projects are all driven by public contribution, if you think you can help the project in some way don’t be too shy to send them an inquiry.

My goal was not to find out which GPS devices could with a whole bunch of tweaking and 3rd party software possibly be hooked up to a Mac and have some type of support. I wanted to see which manufacturers put the time in to produce their own software that slips right into the system without any fiddling around.

This OEM type of support for a less popular operating system really represents who’s working hard to keep their market share and their users happy.

The results were no less than what I expected with OEM support for Mac OS X on TomTom and Garmin devices and with Magellan and Mio being left out in the cold totally unsupported.

Garmin devices have a small, powerful suite of software to use - all beautifully integrated with the Mac operating system. Bobcat, MapInstall, POI Loader, Connect and the Communicator Plugin for other software and services like Google Maps, Mapquest and Geocaching.com allow you to do everything you’d expect and more from your Garmin GPS device and a Mac based system. All their OS X software is available on the Garmin Mac OS X Software Page.

Although TomTom devices also have OEM support for Mac OS X the software seems to be a bit more of a storefront to help them sell more services to you. The TomTom software however is fully functional and allows you to do all the things you need to do with your device like adding points of interest, doing backups, changing voices and updating your maps.

With the software storefront you can also purchase subscriptions to their ’safety camera’ updating service and their traffic service - both of which will for sure save you time and money.

You can download their Mac OS X software from the TomTom Plus Services web site.

Not that it’s a super-surprise to me - but Magellan doesn’t have OEM support for Mac OS X and the Magellan devices.

You can see from my interaction with the Magellan uber-cool Ask Maggie Web Support System that no Mac software support is available.

I do find it kind of funny though that Maggie decided to ask me if the ’solution’ provided was helpful or not. Even though Maggie ever so thoughtfully provided a link to the front page of the Apple web site I’m going to have to say “No her SOLUTION was not very helpful”.

Mio was the least supported - Yes… even less than Magellan without even confirmation in a search on their web site that Mac support was not available.

With the type of support that Garmin and TomTom offer their users you can see why they are the real front-runners in the GPS market. You can expect them to hold on to this position because they’re going to work hard on the development of their devices to expand their user-base and keep you happy.

It’s not only my GPS that’s telling me where to go, I hear it from different people all the time.

This article is about changing the vehicle icons on your Garmin Nuvi device, so if you’re looking to change the voices on your GPS you can learn how to change your GPS voices with these tutorials on SourceGPS:
http://www.sourcegps.com/2008/04/21/change-your-garmin-gps-voice/
http://www.sourcegps.com/2008/03/08/changing-and-creating-tomtom-voices/

I’m going to have to say right off the bat that Garmin is the front-liner though when it comes to customization and total tweaking control. Not only do they allow you to have the ability to change your voice files, but you can have some real control over your vehicle icon too.

Garmin has a garage (actually a web site) set up just for storing cars to share with the planet. There’s over 50 vehicles in the garage to choose from like the blue RC Buggy pictured on the left.

Some of you knowledgeable people are going to say “TomTom lets you change theirs too!” - but the cheezy little vehicle bitmap icons that TomTom utilizes don’t even come close to comparing to the vehicle icons that are available for the Garmin GPS Navigators.

Garmin says their vehicle icons will work for the Nuvi series, the Zumo series and the StreetPilot c510, c530, c550 and the c580. You can download the vehicle icons from The Garmin Garage.

Check back at SourceGPS in a little while and we’ll have a tutorial on how to make your own custom icons for the Garmin series of GPS Navigators.

So how can one plan a route to take when there’s no concrete or asphalt pathways (and no navigational map data available either)?

The guys over at GPSies (pronounced Gypsies & meaning vegabond) have made available a conversion utility that will convert between 21 different formats! Now you can plan your route in Google Earth, export it as a KML and then convert the KML to whatever format your device supports! That means that this will be compatible with the different varieties of Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, Trimble and lots of other brands. Not to mention that with Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) you’ll have access to some of the best satellite imagery of the world to make your route.

Wow - Check out what www.GPSies.com has to offer.

Geotagging is a fairly-new, automatic and easy way to keep your digital photos organized. With a GPS enabled camera you can include GPS location information within the Exif data in your pictures. The problem however is that the cameras that have this functionality built in are still very expensive. Pictured on the right is Nikon’s D300 which is a GPS enabled camera. The last time I looked at the price for this camera it was about $1,700 which is a little outside my budget especially since the price doesn’t include any lenses for the camera.

No kidding around the D300 is a beautiful camera and I would love to have one but I still want to be able to eat more than a little bowl of rice every day next month so really I can’t afford one.

Lucky for me (and all the rest of the people on strict budgets) that there are alternative methods to automatically Geotag your digital pictures without burning up the money you’re going to spend on food for the next two months.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is the best deal at about $50 and it comes in two different models.

The water-resistant and non-water-resistant models are the same price so you might as well go for the extra security of having a more rugged model that comes with a cozy rubber-bumper case too.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is compatible with all digital cameras and camera-phones and can actually be used as a PC-GPS as well. It comes with the software that helps you easily create a 3D photo-journey in Google Earth and in Google Maps.

If you’re wondering about accuracy you can be assured this will be as accurate as any other device on the market. It comes with the widely popular SiRF III Chipset that is used in many GPS systems.

Sony says that the GPS-CS1KA GPS Image tracker is compatible with virtually any digital still camera and camcorder. Record the time, date and location to each shot you take. You can use with any of camera since now Picture Motion Browser software is included in GPS-CS1KA. Once the images and data are on your PC, the supplied image tracker software synchronizes the photos with latitude, longitude and time reading from the GPS-CS1KA unit. Activate the Picture Motion Browser software are your photos will pop up next to push pins on Google Maps or Google Earth by the actual location where you shot the picture.

But wait just a second! This is selling for $150 which is about $100 more than the i-gotU model that does exactly the same thing.

Alright - it does have a pretty cool design and also the hook for a carabiner (those ever so popular clips that are used for hiking and now everything else too) which makes it something you can just clip to your backpack and forget about until the journey is over. Your call on whether it’s worth the extra $100 though.

The GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr Lite is also a great choice - it’s reasonable priced at about $100 and has all the features you’d expect from a device like this.

They claim that “the most exciting feature of all is that you can upload your photos to flickr online” which you can do with any other picture too! That particular feature is not really unique to any device and if you’ve geotagged your pictures with any other device flickr will treat them the same when you’ve uploaded them.

With a cool design and also the clip for the carabiner you’d think it’d be worth as much as the Sony model. I’m guessing the extra $50 on the Sony is the price you pay for the little painted on Sony logo.

There’s been mention that this GPS device doesn’t live up to the advertised 22+ hours of normal battery usage time but that would be totally dependent on where the device is being used. If it’s always searching for satellites it’ll use up the battery a lot faster than if it has constant locks on them. Even so 10 hours on a rechargeable Li-ion battery would suffice for most users.

So there it all is! Geotagging your digital pictures automatically, cheaply, and easily!