The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a breeding ground for innovation. Companies tend to unveil some of their cornerstone technologies here. This is the case with Trimble, who announced the availability of three GPS applications for BlackBerry users. If you’ve got the 8830 or the 8130 with built-in GPS, you’ll be able to see what these programs can do for you.
“Trimble has extended its breath of offerings by making our GPS-based software applications available for CDMA-based BlackBerry smartphones,” said Larry Fox, business development director, Trimble Outdoors. “BlackBerry smartphones offer a distinctive platform for experiencing outdoor adventures.”
The first program, AllSport GPS, acts as a fitness tracker. You can monitor your time, speed, calories burned, and distance traveled with this program. This allows for easy storage of workouts, which you can assemble into graphs and charts. It even allows you to download maps which indicate recommended routes.
Geocache Navigator is a treasure hunting application. While I’m not quite clear on its purpose, it appears to be just that — guiding you towards a predetermined destination. Whether that destination is set by the user or some computer, I’m not sure. I would hope that it’s just a basic GPS mapping program. Anyway, you get on-screen maps with compass navigation, in addition to speed, heading, location, distance, cache description logs, “hints and other useful information for both teh most experienced and novice user.” This is something I’ll have to look into.
Finally, Trimble Outdoors — the application, not the company — is an outdoor planning application perfect for hikers and campers. You can leave a “breadcrumb trail” and mark points of interest along the way. “Users can also leverage the multi-media components of their phones to create photographic, video, and audio notes of their trips for sharing online and viewing in Google Earth.” Now that’s neat.
They’re not too expensive, either. It’ll cost you $40 for the year or $6 per month for all three. You can get it through Handmark.
