Amazon has knocked $30 off the Garmin nuvi 265T GPS system today, bringing the price to $150 with free shipping. Perhaps more enticing than the price, though, is that you get free traffic data for the life of the device.

Do you remember where you were back on January 30th of 2008? CrunchGear was at a Garmin event in New York City watching the GPS company announce its very own smartphone. Fast forward to today, and the device is finally about to ship. Two devices, actually — the Linux-based nuvifone G60 and the nuvifone M20, which runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional.

Do you have a dog that constantly gets away from you? Do you hate chasing your dog through your neighborhood, your cheeks burning with shame as your neighbors watch you yet again running down the street in your socks? If so, a new GPS-based pet location service may be worth your time.

Amazon’s got a pretty decent deal on a golf yardage GPS unit at $99. I can’t say I care for the $35 yearly fee that enables you to download new courses but if you play the same courses over and over again, you can download them once without the need to renew the service year after year.

If you’re actually an important person in real life, the Spark Nano GPS Tracker looks like a pretty cool doodad to keep in the pockets of your very-expensive pants. It’s basically a $200 panic button that alerts your friends and family that you’ve been kidnapped and/or marooned on an island somewhere.

You can save $30 and some dignity by making sure you never get lost again (unless your GPS system tells you to drive into a lake like that episode of The Office) with the Magellan Maestro 4210 widescreen GPS system.

A new bill floating around the New Jersey legislature would ban the use of GPS devices while driving. You already know why, too: it leads to unsafe driving. The bill was introduced on June 8, and would punish violators with a $100 fine.

This is theCATS.i. It’s a tracking device that its creator says is so small it’s “almost undetectable when being worn.” I could see paranoid parents putting it in their kid’s pocket to make sure he doesn’t wander off. I could see a dog owner slap it onto the collar, to keep an eye on Fido at all times. And, in a Hollywood-esque moment, I could see slipping it in your wife’s purse, to make sure that she and the gardener aren’t too friendly. (But now you’re dealing with trust issues…)

NEC has announced the development of an unmanned drone [JP] that can fly by itself to a specific location and send back positional information and video images. The company says it’s the first drone made for civilian applications that can transmit both kinds of data at the same time.

If you have trouble remembering where you parked your car or where you buried a treasure chest full of pirate booty, maybe you’d like this keychain GPS unit from ECCO. You lock in whichever position you’re looking to eventually return to and follow the magic arrow on the screen to find your way back.

The TwoNav Aventura is a GPS device with a twist. The $900 device lets you input your own maps using vector and raster imagery, allowing you to turn the topography of Scranton into a fairy land of joy and wonder. It’s Europe-only right now and you can buy them in single country or Western European models.

Can’t find your way out of a paper bag? Poke a hole in said bag with your finger and then tear it open and step out. Simps, done.

Can’t find your way around town? You can get a refurbished Magellan GPS unit for $50, which is a good price since the entire GPS infrastructure is apparently about to crumble in the next year or so. You don’t want to sink too much money into a GPS system, if that’s the case.

Remember this day. Today is the day that you saw the future of GPS navigation. Tele Atlas has partnered with Norway-based BLOM to provide photorealistic maps to personal navigation devices. So far only 40 cities in Europe have been ported to the service, but many more are scheduled to be released in the coming quarters. Soon the days of having basic 3D boxes to represent buildings will be gone and an actual picture will be there instead.

Apparently the space boxes that send GPS data down to our waiting TomToms and iPhones are breaking down. The entire system could start failing next year, sending all of us into a strange hell of missed turns and aimless driving.

Here’s a nice deal on a decked out GPS system from Magellan. You can get the Maestro 4350, a 4.3-inch touchscreen unit that doubles as a Bluetooth speakerphone and features integrated traffic data, for $180 with free shipping.

Some privacy news to freak you out this fine Monday. A court ruling in Wisconsin means that police there can track your movements with a GPS device without a warrant. So, let’s say you’re suspected of something. The police can then slap a Garmin on your car, without any permission from the courts, and follow your car’s movements about town. Sorta scary, sure.

This clever little piece of kit is basically a great GPS unit bolted to a 3.2-megapixel camera with 4X zoom. It also has a tri-axial compass so you don’t have to have the unit level to tell your direction.

Apparently Navigon is abruptly getting out of the hardware GPS game in North America, citing “the difficult economic environment” and “aggressive pricing” from competitors. Navigon CEO Egon Minar told GPS Business News, “We have decided to withdraw from the PND business in North America for the time being. We are however not closing down our Chicago office which will continue to serve our automotive and mobile phone businesses in North America.”