Road Trip With Google Maps Navigation

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Last week Dr. Jim Taylor had an underwhelming experience with Bing’s turn-by-turn garbage for WinMo (double garbage), talking trash about all navigation systems that use wireless service.

I think a considerable drawback of these smartphone navigation apps is that they rely on cellular signals rather than direct GPS signals to get the guidance information. This technical difference presents two problems: 1) it won’t work if there isn’t a cell signal and 2) it will work inconsistently if there is spotty cell service.

Bad diagnosis, Doctor. While that and the rest of your list of complaints you built from a short field test of Microsoft’s slipshod copycat of Google Maps Navigation may be true of Bing, I drove over six hundred miles this weekend relying on Android’s navigation system from New York through Vermont and New Hampshire, encountering extended edge connections and sporadic zone deaths and have nothing but praise to report.

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Mobility Digest Request For Ruben

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I would like to take a second and and send our thoughts and prayers to Ruben van Assouw who was the only survivor among the 103 passengers killed on Afriqiyah Airways flight Wednesday in Tripoli. Ruben, who is only 9 lost his Mother, Father, and 11 year old Brother on this flight. This will be a very … Read more

Google closes up cell shop.

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I’m not one for saying I told you so, therefore I’ll just get right into it.  Google has officially decided to stop selling the Nexus One online and move distribution into retail and carrier outlets.  Cited reasons were customer’s desires to log some hands-on time before dropping 500+ bones on this thing, as well as … Read more

Tegra Going Droid

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Nvidia’s Tegra chips have been in Zune devices and are featured in Kins as well. But we’ve seen teaser images of Tegra in action and we’ve all been waiting to be blown away by Tegra and to date we haven’t seen that. Well Nvidia’s CEO recently spoke about the future of Tegra. He stated that … Read more

Holy Crap! More Windows Phone 7 apps and it’s not even out yet…

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We’ve been seeing a great spewing forth of apps for WinPho 7 recently as new SDK’s and updates roll out.  Most of these are just rehashes of previous apps like this Twitter client and this GeoAlbum that caches photos to your phone based on your location, like pulling up pictures of a particular cities attractions and … Read more

Dolby Surround Sound on phones… really?

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I work around a lot of bad ass audio products at Best Buy.  This has the effect of giving me quite of bit of skepticism toward products with “simulated surround sound.”  For the uninitiated, Simulated surround sound is based off the idea that sound waves coming from different directions are changed by the shape of our ear and the waves path into it.  By placing a microphone inside a model of human ear, researchers are able to measure what changes are made by the shape of our ear and create those changes at the speaker or headphone and “tricking” the brain into believing it has come from a particular direction.  This has obvious unintended consequences when the sound wave travels through the ear “again” and is changed a second time creating wholly unnatural sounds that don’t trick your brain into crap.  It does have some advantages, but for most it just doesn’t matter.

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