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.

Tele Atlas maps are already on TomTom, the PSP, Mio and Pioneer devices. The first set of maps will be available in June with North America and Asia to follow in 2010. We can’t wait to see where this will take personal navigation. That is, of course, if the aging GPS satellites are still flying.Tele Atlas Sets New Standard for Realistic Maps with Highly Detailed 3D City Images

GHENT, Belgium–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Tele Atlas, a leading global provider of digital maps and dynamic content for navigation and location based solutions, announced today the availability of 3D, photorealistic Advanced City Models. Designed for use in navigation systems and location-based applications, Advanced City Models are three-dimensional representations of major city centers that dramatically raise the clarity and reality of screen images within in-car and portable navigation systems and mobile devices. With Advanced City Models, displays more closely match what users actually see in their surroundings, helping them more easily find locations and services.

The release of Advanced City Models builds on the company’s suite of enhancement products, which include Urban Maps, Points of Interest (POIs), Voice Maps, Speed Profiles and dynamic content. Tele Atlas has been delivering industry leading 3D products since 2006, used today in Mio, Pioneer and Sony PSP navigation solutions. The company accelerated the development of more advanced 3D images through its partnership with Norway-based BLOM and today transforms aerial imagery from BLOM into photorealistic maps.

“With the release of Advanced City Models, we are quickly delivering increasingly rich, powerful content to our customers that enhances their products and applications,” said Tele Atlas CEO Bill Henry. “Our partnership with BLOM and our new advanced production capabilities allow us to deliver incredibly detailed, realistic 3D maps to the industry and provide a superior experience for the end user in more cities than ever before.”

The June release of Advanced City Models will deliver 40 cities across Europe, and many more cities are scheduled to be available in subsequent quarterly releases. In 2010, Tele Atlas expects to deliver hundreds of cities, including cities in North America and Asia Pacific. Advanced City Models help Tele Atlas partners deliver products and devices that provide:

Lifelike Display with a high level of optical quality that answers the consumer demand for a more realistic, appealing map display;
Improved Orientation that depicts city centers, complete with city blocks, building textures and notable landmarks, to enhance recognition and guidance; and
Improved Navigation Experiences with a richer, more attractive visual guide for driving and pedestrian applications.

 

The J.D. Power and Associates just released the 2008 Portable Navigation Device customer satisfaction rankings with Garmin taking the top seat and TomTom following closely behind. These scores are a composite of six factors that include: ease of use, routing, system appearance, speed of system, voice direction, and navigation display screen. 

Garmin ranks highest among portable navigation device manufacturers, performing particularly well in the display screen, ease of use and appearance factors

TomTom follows Garmin in the ranking, performing well in the routing, speed of system and voice direction factors

Personally, I have never been a big fan of Garmin interfaces; who am I though but a lowly gadget blogger.

JDPower via GPSTracklog

There are lots of GPS units out there, talking to lots of drivers.  Some people may even enjoy the voices produced by their GPS units. But only the Mio Knight Rider GPS can speak to you in the voice of William Daniels, the original voice of KITT from the Knight Rider television show.

Sure, it’s gimmicky, but it’s also a lot of fun to hear Daniels’ voice giving you turn-by-turn driving directions. I’ve been using this GPS for a short while now, and even once the novelty of pretending to drive KITT wears off — especially when your car doesn’t respond when you say “Kitt, I need you pal!” into your wristwatch — the voice of KITT is surprisingly pleasant and enjoyable.  If for some reason you do grow weary of William Daniels giving you directions, you can select the generic Male and Female voices.

The unit itself is extremely light.  The plastic case is shiny, and not uncomfortable to hold.  It slips easily into shirt and jacket pockets, as well as the back pocket of your pants.  It’s not bulky or awkward, so it’s easy to take the Mio Knight Rider GPS with you when you exit your vehicle.  In addition to a power button on the top, there’s also an SD slot so that you can load new maps.

The user interface is easy to use, and the touch screen is responsive.  I never felt the need to stab the screen to make it recognize my input.  Battery life is acceptable, though not stellar, which is to be expected from a device that is intended to be plugged into your car’s power outlet for most of its use.  Satellite acquisition is reasonably fast, as is route calculation, and most of the routes it plots are acceptable.  It doesn’t usually take me the way I would choose to go to some of the destinations I selected, but it never led me astray.

You can select from four screen modes: 3D, 2D, route, and turn-by-turn (thelast two only available when you’ve actually defined a destination).  Several preset zoom levels are available for quick use, as well as manual incremental zoom.  You can have the top-right widget display the distance to go, time to go, speed, estimated time of arrival, or just a plain old digital clock.  The bottom right widget can display a compass, battery life, satellite signal strength, or a speaker icon telling you whether you’ve muted the voice or not.

This GPS is not without its faults, of course.  The user interface is a little sluggish, especially when typing in location names as it tries to provide a list of auto-complete matches for you.  If you keep this sluggishness in mind, you won’t have any problems.  If, like me, you forget the sluggishness, you’ll type in extra characters and find yourself pressing the backspace key a lot.

My other big gripe about this unit is the mechanism for finding locations nearby.  The destination search screen has three big buttons: City/Area, POI Name, and Search Nearby.  I know where I want to go, so I usually press the POI Name.  This takes me directly to a text input window, where I can start spelling out the name (and pressing the backspace key a lot, because I’m impatient).  That searches the entire state though, so when looking for Wal-Mart the first suggested match is in Akron, Ohio, rather than Columbus, Ohio, where I am.  What I need to press is that “Search Nearby” button, and then press “Search by name” at the top of the following screen: then I can start spelling out my destination and get the list of Wal-Marts in my city.  I’m sure a lot of time was spent deciding that that button configuration was best for the Mio users, but it just doesn’t make sense to me.  It’s aggravating that I need to press an extra button to move past an extra screen to start typing my destination name.

Finally, it took me a while to get the AC power adapter properly settled in the windshield suction mount in such a way that I could easily and quickly dock the GPS in order to charge it.  This is hardly a reason not to buy the device, but it’s worth knowing about, in order to be prepared.

Overall, I enjoyed using the Mio Knight Rider GPS.  It’s not a top-of-the-line GPS, and it’s not a bottom of the barrel, either.  It works well, does what it purports to do with no other fuss, and the included software is perfectly adequate.  All in all, a decent product.  Now, if only someone would get Peter Cullen to record a GPS voice, so I could live my fantasy of riding around inside Optimus Prime…

Bottom Line
Great fun with some good functionality. A must for KITT fans.

Several live shots of the Mio Leap K1 have appeared online. The half cellphone, half proper GPS navigator first started making the rounds in early June, but now that there’s live shots we’re excited all over again.

It looks to be a standard candybar, which in and of itself isn’t bad. Obviouslly you’d need to be some sort of GPS fiend (or traveler in a foreign city, like me!) to get the most out of it, but there you go.

Bourgeois things like price and release date haven’t been announced or leaked just yet.

via Navigadget

Oh, it’s true, folks. This is the real deal. The Knight Rider GPS from Mio has a tentative launch set for August and it is priced at $270. The software is still being worked on hence some noticeable sluggishness in the video, but it’s just a demo unit at the moment that’s pretty neat and definitely nerdy. I mean, really, who wants another plain ole GPS when you can have William Daniels telling you where to go with flashing red LEDS?!

Oh, and the TV show is going back into production tomorrow. Not sure if that’s a known fact, but I thought I’d share.

If your name is Michael and you’re into GPS systems, then have I got the unit for you. The Knight Rider GPS by Mio features voice directions by none other than William Daniels, the voice of KITT on the Knight Rider series. When you fire the gadget up, you’ll hear “Hello, Michael. Where do you want to go today?”

No word on a release date, but the price will be $270 when it becomes available. Peter’s got a meeting with Mio later today, so he’ll likely get some more info.

via BBG

Oh let’s just embed GPS in every little thing from now on.

Mio, known for its stand-alone GPS navigation devices, will debut two smartphones at a trade show in Taiwan this week. (Think of that Garmin phone from a few months back.) Surprise, they have built-in GPS!

Even more interesting, perhaps, will be a digital camera with built-in GPS. Why, if it’s more interesting, it doesn’t lead this post, you may ask?

My guess would be that the GPS in the digital cameras would be used to stamp each photo with your coordinates. “Oh, we were there when I took this photo, now I remember.” That type of scenario (and other, more innocent ones, too, of course).

How battery life will be affected and how Best Buy and the like will classify the cameras—they’ll need a snazzy new name to trick consumers—will all partially determine the cameras’ success.

But if Mio markets them simply as digital cameras with “cool new GPS,” yeah, they’ll do fine.

The End.

The 300-series have 4.3-inch widescreen touchscreens, while the 200-series have 3.5-inch screens in a more squarish form factor.

The 200 and 300 have 20-channel GPS receivers and built-in speakers for driving directions, while the 210 and 310 have the same with the addition of real-time traffic updates.

They retail prices for these new GPS units starts at $179 for the 200 and goes up to $249 for the 310 and should hit the shelves on April 1st.

Mio Technology ‘Moovs’ You with the Launch of New GPS Line [Press Release]

You know that cool feature in Google Earth where in decent-sized cities you can have 3D renderings of buildings and so forth? Mio Technologies is bringing that fun to the GPS world with the new C620 and C620t GPS receivers.

The map like most receivers, but simply overlay the 3D imagery of more than 1000 European landmarks. There’s no reason to believe that if the company brought these units to the states that the same thing couldn’t happen here. Cool.

Mio C620 GPS gives you 3D mapping display [Slippery Brick]

I had the opportunity to sit down with Physi-Cal CEO Liz Dickinson the other day and chat about Mio and their upcoming line of watches. The Mio line isn’t just another line of cheapo heart rate monitor watches, but more of a lifestyle watch line that wants to keep you healthy and at the top of your game. I’m a gym rat looking to finally get in shape this year even if it kills me, so the upcoming Select line has me fidgeting like a five year old waiting for the bathroom.

We’ll start with the Ultimate as I’ve been able to fiddle with it for the past few days and so far so good. When it’s combined with the included chest strap I can get a continuous ECG heart rate whenever I want, so I know when I’m burning fat or in an aerobic workout range. It also calculates calories and fat burned during a workout, displays percent of maximum heart rate, calculates average and overall highest heart rate during a workout, indicates when I’m in the zone aka target heart rate, displays time above/below/in target heart rate zone and measures the time it takes this fatty to get back to his resting heart rate. The usual standard features on a running watch like an alarm clock, date, stopwatch, countdown timer, lap counter, and a slew of other features are included. I’ll leave it at that for now, as I’ll have a full review in the coming weeks. The Ultimate is currently available for $140.

Coming in September are the Breeze, Drive and Motiva. The Breeze is the entry-level ECG heart rate monitor watch and works without a chest strap to give you on-demand info on the ole ticker. Its major features include the percent of maximum heart rate calculated based on your age and gender, a visual indicator of how hard you’re working based on heart rate and personal data as well as a stopwatch with eight lap memory, alarm, date, chime and backlit display.

The Drive is a step up from the Breeze and calculates the calories you’ve burned during your workout, has a 12 lap memory stopwatch, has a dual interval countdown timer and best of all, the 3500 Calorie Countdown mode that is specifically designed for the MIO 3500 Calorie Countdown program. In a nutshell, the 3500 Calorie Countdown indicates when you’ve burned enough calories, 3500, to burn a pound of fat. There’s obviously more to it then that, but that’ll have to wait for the full review or if you’re super eager to find out then click here.

The Motiva has my full-undivided attention, as it’s a one-stop-shopping bonanza of a watch. The Motiva encompasses all the key features from the other watches and boasts a ton of other features that will make you wonder why you’ve only heard of Mio now. A patented calorie management system allows you to track your caloric intake and calories burned during exercise against a daily calorie target. This all works in conjunction with the 3500 CC and includes five timers with dual interval timers designated for a 13-week walk/run program. It’s not just a watch that tells you how fat you are, but more of a lifestyle watch that wants to keep you in the know on what your body is doing based on your heart rate. Can it get any better then this? I don’t think so.

All three watches are water resistant up to 30m, have a battery life of 12 months, work with all Mio interchangeable watchbands and have a nifty battery hatch that lets you replace the battery without fear of ruining the seal. The Breeze will retail for $59. The Drive will set you back an extra $20 bucks at $79. And the Motiva will only be $99.

Mio

Mio first showed off the DigiWalker C520 portable GPS device during the heady days of CES back in January. Well now it’s out there, waiting for you to buy it so you can go on all sorts of GPS-guided adventures together. You’ll probably first notice its 4.3-inch widescreen, which, based on some of the company’s other devices, should be more than adequate to navigate the mean streets of your local town.

What you can’t see but will no doubt appreciate is the C520’s new text-to-speech feature. Just like it sounds, the unit will read out directions and so forth in an English that’s slightly less robotic-sounding than you might think. Go ahead, listen for yourself if you don’t believe me.

All I know is, everything Mio I’ve used has been solid. Just like previous ones, this one has basic multimedia capabilities and pre-loaded maps for both the U.S. and Canada. Personally, I don’t have an extra $400 to drop on a GPS unit, but if you’re in the market this should do the trick.

Product Page [Mio]

Mio’s got a low cost, entry level GPS receiver with your name on it. It’s the C220 and has a 3.5-inch LCD and doles out turn-by-turn directions (in English, Spanish or French) thanks to its SiRFstarIII receiver. Supposedly this receiver is the best one out there, so, theoretically, you shouldn’t run into the same GPS problems that I did trying to get a signal in the canyons of Manhattan.

The C220 comes with all the updated maps you can handle, even for you folks living in the middle of nowhere in Alaska (and in the middle of paradise in Hawaii). And at only $250 (you should see the prices of other GPS receivers out there), even a poor bloke such as myself can afford it.

Product Page [Mio]

The secret Skype subject line is: