Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’ve only had my Treo 700wx for about 4 months now, but it works very well for me. Now Palm is finally unveiling a decent successor, the Treo 800W. It has just about every enhancement I can think of outside of a multi-touch iPhone interface, and a bigger screen. The only thing I don’t see mentioned is GPS capability, but given that other Palm devices are including this and the wealth of all other features, it seems pretty likely. The only thing that I’m a little sad about is the microSD, since both my cameras and my phones have taken regular SD now for the last 2+ years. But maybe by the time I actually get this phone, the 8GB microSD will be affordable. You can now get a 16GB SD card for half the price of an 8GB microSD… Oh well, I don’t even use more than one quarter of my cheap 4GB SD card in my current phone, so I guess I should stop whining!

http://blog.treonauts.com/2008/01/more-treo-800w.html?utm_source=tnemail&utm_medium=daily

Those of you following my blog for a while probably know that I write a lot about two gadgets in particular that I own – the Treo 650 phone (which I just upgraded to a Treo 700P) and the iPod (which I currently own the 5^th generation 60GB model capable of playing video). While I love both devices, my ultimate goal as a gadget freak is to only have one to carry around. You know, the whole “convergence” thing taken to it’s essence.

Some recent studies have suggested that most people want a phone that’s just a phone and doesn’t do a zillion other things. This may or may not be true, but if it is, I think it’s partly due to the current set of phones that “pretend” to be all-in-one devices. These phones are not the “smartphones” that comprise the Treo, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones, but rather are tiny stylish devices like the Motorola Razr which have cameras, calendars, and now often MP3 players built in.. The small screens and limited space for buttons and controls, not to mention a tiny batteries that have to cope with more demand for power, means that these devices end up being mainly good for novelty uses compared to dedicated MP3 players like the iPod or full-fledged digital cameras – even the sleekest compact of these.

For those of us who are too old or geeky to care about looking fashionable and don’t need the smallest phone on the block, the Palm (and previously Handspring) Treo have long been a great phone that combines a huge array of other uses due to its sporting the PalmOS operating system, the one used on Palm personal digital assistants for more than 10 years. Thousands of programs, many free and many others inexpensive shareware, have been written for this platform to the point where you could almost compare Treos to tiny PC’s.

For example I used my Treo 650 as a GPS (along with a tiny GPS receiver that hid in my glove compartment and which the Treo would connect to wirelessly) in order to get constant indications of where I was on the road, turn-by-turn directions to a destination, and even dynamic rerouting if I missed a turn – all communicated via both the Treo’s screen as well as a large choice of audio voices. I had all my contact information, schedules, to-do lists, and notes that I could sync with my MS Outlook and hosted exchange account. I had a version of Quicken (“Pocket Quicken” as it’s called), so I could record transactions on the road and sync with my main Quicken program when I got home. I had a program that allowed me to view my desktop of my PC at home and control any aspect of my computer no matter where I was. I got my email, of course, and was able to communicate via instant messages, text messaging, etc. I could also view full web pages and access most websites with no problem. Oh yes, and there was a phone too!

While the Treos had several MP3 players, none really gave the same degree of elegance as the combination of iTunes and the iPod. Many had features that the iPod didn’t, though. Pocket Tunes is the best known of these programs and has probably the largest array of capabilities - in addition to playing MP3’s, it can play Ogg Vorbis format files (an open-source format that has better quality and smaller files than MP3), and Windows Media Audio file format (a proprietary format that MS developed). Within the last year it also started supporting DMA-protected WMA files from music subscription sites like Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and Napster To Go. This allows you to subscribe to a service for a $10-15/month fee and download an unlimited number of songs to your computer and subsequently to your portable device. Pocket Tunes in its Deluxe version also has had the ability to stream a type of internet radio called Shoutcast (MP3 streams), so you could listen to live radio, although until very recently not at a very good quality level due to the network speeds at which cell phones have been able to communicate. If you are an audio book fan and have an account with the largest digital audio book company out there, Audible.com, Treos, as well as all PalmOS and PocketPC-based phones and PDA’s have long been able to sync Audible format files from your computer and play them. More recently those who have a phone with a cellular data plan or a PDA with a Wifi connection could also download programs from their Audible library on the fly via a program called Audible Air.

Most of the MP3 players for the Treo have traditionally done their syncing, at least on Windows PC’s, through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player which is free and built in to the Windows Operating System. Alternately you can simply copy files directly onto an external memory card on your Treo and then let the program search for these files and add them to its library. While this works, it’s far from ideal now that cards with very large capacities are being sold inexpensively and for those of us who have tens of gigabytes of audio files, be they music, audio books, or podcasts. Some people fare well with Windows Media player, but in my brief time trying to use it to sync with my Treo, I had numerous problems, ranging from it recopying files that were already on my device each time I synced, to not copying files that should have been copied, etc. It simply wasn’t reliable.

While there were certainly limitations before that made the earlier Treos not the ideal choice of everyone as an MP3 player, many people have and do use the Treo 650, 600, perhaps even earlier ones still as their only portable music player. The Treo 700P, Palm’s latest version of the Treo, has features that make it a much more powerful device, all the more capable of replacing your primary MP3 player. The main feature that helps make the phone more powerful is its ability transfer data at much higher speeds than previously via a newer wireless (cellular, not Wifi) network technology, called EvDO. While the version of EvDO that’s currently available and accessible via the 700P is still not quite as fast as what most people have in their homes via their DSL or Cable Internet connection, it still ranges from three to ten times the speed of a dial-up modem. This speed will improve, especially when future versions of EvDO get deployed. The difference in speed means that your Treo can now stream live video and high-quality audio. You can download applications in seconds rather than minutes. Surfing the web is now a lot more like it is on a broadband connection on a PC, albeit with a much smaller screen. Just as broadband on the PC gives you more freedom to explore the Internet on demand, EvDO on a phone gives you more motivation to use it for accessing the Internet. It used to be that for many uses I would just delay what I needed to do until I got home because doing it on the slow data connection on my phone was too painful. It was only when I knew I wouldn’t be near a PC for a long time and I really needed to get some information on the web that I would use the Treo for accessing a website.

Another key new feature is the Treo 700P’s ability to handle memory cards that can hold more than 2GB, the limit of previous Treos. Although installing a hack could let you work around that limit on those older models, it required some degree of technical expertise to do. Now you can just plug in your 4GB SD card and it will work as a 4GB card without any extra work. Presumably when 8GB SD cards and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards come out in the next year or two, these will all work as well without additional software or hacking. While 4GB is still low compared to the storage on some MP3 players, it’s large enough to hold dozens of albums worth of music, not too shabby for a card the size of a postage stamp.

With these (and many other) new capabilities and a couple of new applications from third-party developers, it looks like the Treo 700P could easily replace an iPod for many people, myself included. The third party applications that I speak of are Motion Apps’ mOcean, CodeWave’s myTunesRSS, and Softick’s “Softick Audio Gateway.” There are additional applications that enhance the Treo’s multimedia capabilities worlds above the current iPods, but I’ll tackle those later.

Motion Apps’ mOcean is an MP3 player for the Treo that syncs with your iTunes library and actually has an interface that looks and acts a lot like an iPod. Obviously the Treo doesn’t have the famed iPod “clickwheel,” so instead mOcean provides a graphical version of the clickwheel that you can use via the Treo’s touchscreen. In fact, Apple is rumored to be coming out with similar touchscreen clickwheel interface for a future Video iPod that will do away with the physical clickwheel in order to recoup space for an expanded screen. It almost feels like I have a future iPod in my hands when I’m using mOcean! mOcean actually improves on the iPod in some ways due to the Treo having a keyboard – for example you can skip to the S’s in a large list of songs my just hitting the ’s’ key, rather than have to scroll with the clickwheel until you got all the way to the s’s. Although though there are some minor inconsistencies that probably in many cases only advanced iPod/iTunes users would notice, for the most part it is an extremely close replica of the iPod/iTunes experience, and Motion Apps appear to be constantly working on new features and functionality. The only obvious shortfall is the lack of ability to play AAC files and video files, but other programs are available on the Treo that that will do this, like the free TCPMP.

MyTunesRSS is a streaming server that you run on a PC that’s connected to the Internet. It syncs up with your iTunes library and makes your PC a streaming server for any audio and even video content that is in your iTunes (although for video you have a really good, fast connection for it to work well). For those of us with tens of gigabytes of audio and video files in our libraries, this allows you to have immediate access to your entire library without having to go out and buy ten or twenty 4GB memory cards, or have to wait until they come out with larger capacity cards. Of course, your ability to play these files is dependent on being in an area where you can get a data connection, and probably even an EvDO connection, which is still mostly in major metropolitan areas. So, for those who spend any time traveling or in more rural areas, this may not be a great solution.

The other piece of this content puzzle is something that isn’t quite as obvious, but for me was an important factor in realizing that using my Treo for listing to podcasts, audio books and music might be a better solution that using my iPod. If you have an MP3 player like an iPod and you’re listening to music and your cell phone rings, you have to shut off the iPod, take your earbuds out, and answer your phone, all before the caller on the other end hangs up. It can be a bit of a hassle, and if you have to use a handsfree device for your phone it makes it that much harder still. The 700P comes with a handsfree headset that doubles as stereo headphones. This allows you to listen to audio on your Treo, and then when a call comes in, it interrupts your music or podcast or audio book and prompts you to answer the phone, at which point the stereo headphones simply become a handsfree headset through which you can have a conversation. While this makes things a lot easier than having a phone and an MP3 player as separate devices, it still means you need to take the Treo out of your pocket or off your belt in order to answer the call.

Earlier this year, a company that has been making other well-known and useful software for the Treo and other Palm devices for years came out with a way to do this all wirelessly. Some quick background first. The wireless technology which I’m referring to here, and which you’ve undoubtedly heard of by now, is called “Bluetooth.” It was designed specifically for devices to communicate with other devices at short range (30 feet or less) and at relatively slow speeds (much slower than wireless networking known as Wifi). Probably the most popular use for this technology so far is the wireless headsets for cell phones that you might see planted in or over people’s ear. If that ear is on the side of their head that’s not visible to you, it’s easy to initially think they are talking to themselves when they are actually having a phone conversation. While Bluetooth has been very useful for this use, it does not, as you might expect, allow you to listen to audio other than that of a phone call. To listen to stereo music, you need to have a phone and a device that implements something called an Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, or A2DP, which allows wireless digital streaming of different types of digital audio formats fromone device to another. Unfortunately even the latest greatest Treo does not support A2DP. Fortunately for us, the genius programmers at Softick worked around this lack of capability of the Treo so that it could actually do A2DP with compatible Bluetooth stereo headsets that have started to become available in the last year or two. So now you don’t even have to bother with taking the Treo out of your pocket or off of your belt to answer a call while your listening to something. You can do everything wirelessly, including pausing the audio and skipping to the next or previous track. I can see one really nice use of this for me – I can now do yard work with a headset on and keep my Treo on the deck, safe from getting wet or full dirt!

A couple of caveats about this should be mentioned, though. While Softick’s program works on previous Treos, it still doesn’t quite work on the 700P. Palm updated the Bluetooth implementation on the 700P, breaking the compatibility, and so now Softick is hard at work trying to come up with a version that will work on the 700P – something that they are hoping to get out in the next week or so. Also, to be fair, you can buy Bluetooth headsets with an attachment that plugs into an iPod. This does add a considerable amount of bulk, though, to the otherwise fairly small iPod, making it a good deal larger than the Treo, although you could also use these on the much smaller iPod Nano.

When Apple came out with the Video iPod, it was the biggest leap in functionality since the first iPod debuted in 2001. The success of the video capability has convinced many movie and television companies to offer video for sale on the iTunes Music Store, or even for free over the Internet. And while mOcean still doesn’t sync video content yet, you can watch both streaming video as well as video files you’ve transferred from your computer to your Treo via a cabled hotsync. Not only that, but you can watch video in many more formats than you can with the iPod. The iPod allows only for a couple of types of Mpeg 4 formats, whereas programs like TCMP and Kinoma allow for AVI, DivX, XviD, and various Mpeg formats.

Finally, through yet additional third-party software and services, you can listen to or view a slew of additional content on your Treo that will not be possible on an iPod unless Apple actually develops an iPod phone that does EvDO, or an iPod with Wifi built in. Orb is a product that lets you use you stream all your audio, video, and even pictures to any computer capable of receiving them, and it has been tested successfully with the Treo 700P. Not only that, but if you have a TV Tuner card in your PC you can actually stream all the live channels you get through that tuner card as well. A similar service/product called Slingbox also will also let you do this, although they are still working on the software that will let you do this with a Treo. For those who subscribe to Satellite Radio, there is a way to use your Treo to stream your XM or Serius channels directly to your Treo. There are other streaming servers like Gloonet, and I’m sure ones that I’ve not even heard of yet, but the ones I’ve listed are probably the best known.

The iPod has become so popular for good reasons. It’s not just that it’s had a great marketing force behind it (although it has), or just great looks (that too), or that it was one of the first players to incorporate a hard drive that could store hundreds (or thousands) of songs. It’s also that the user interface on the iPod is for most people a very easy and intuitive one to operate. Its syncing abilities are also easy to set up and understand, at least compared to most other platforms out there. iTunes, the PC part of the iPod, is also pretty streightward and manages music (and now video) in a simple and powerful way.

I realize that some people truly don’t want anything but a small device to play their 30 favorite albums on, and for them, I suppose, an iPod (as well as many other MP3 players) is still a great choice. Heck, for them, anything more than an iPod Nano would be overkill. However, for those of us who are always looking for more powerful gadgets, ones that can serve most if not all of our requirements for a portable device (be they to listen to audio, watch video, make phone calls, read email, etc., etc.) the Treo 700P really is a powerhouse of convergence. With the services and software I’ve mentioned in this article, it can do everything and much more than current iPod models, and with mOcean can even look and act like an iPod. It does this at a price that’s at least equivalent to the top 60GB iPod model (if you buy the Treo 700P along with a 2-year cell phone contract), or at most for a couple hundred more, if paying buying at the top retail price with no discounts. The main disadvantage to the Treo, other than what some people would consider to be it’s inferior look fashion-wise, is the fact that it doesn’t have a big built-in hard drive. While 4GB is a lot for some people, and certainly is still the most you can have on an iPod Nano as of now, it still pales in comparison to the mammoth 60GB hard drive in the top-of-the-line iPod model. With myTunesRSS and other streaming solutions, you can get around this, but you are still dependent on having an EvDO signal, which is still far from ubiquitous. EvDO coverage will increase, of course, as will memory card capacities, making this less of an issue, but for now, some will still consider it too much of a limitation to give up their iPod altogether. Plus, as coverage and storage capacity increases on the Treo, it’s unlikely that the iPod will stand still. The rumor is that a new video iPod with a much larger screen will come out later this year and will make watching video on the Treo look weak in comparison. Along with that bigger screen may come additional features that will remove more advantages of the Treo, such as Bluetooth or Wifi capability.

For right now, though, the Treo does still seem to win in all but storage capacity. Heck, even its battery is replaceable, unlike the infamous non-replaceable iPod’s! I for one am going to ditch my iPod. That doesn’t mean I won’t be tempted by future ones. If a new one comes out that has a screen twice the size of my Treo’s, it’s going to be hard to resist. Then again, since I don’t watch nearly as much video as I do listen to audio podcasts, audio books, and music, it would be hard to justify having both of these. Hopefully, though, Palm’s next Treo will also sport a larger screen, or at least a video output as the iPod does which allows for plugging in video goggles that make screen size irrelevant!

Just yesterday I was checking around to see if by chance the latest firmware for the Treo 650 had been released without me realizing it. I’ve been pretty busy lately, so haven’t been as current on news as I would like. There were definitely rumors that it was going to happen soon, but nothing concrete. Oh well. This morning I woke up for some reason at 5am and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so went to check email and I saw that Pa1mOne has finally released the long-awaited firmware update for the unlocked GSM Treo 650. There is also another update for the Sprint Treo 650, which is actually the second update for that phone. Unfortunately no update yet for the Cingular Treo 650, but hopefully that will be out before the end of the month.

TreoCentral recommended an alternate installation instruction for upgrading the firmware, and I decided to use this. The alternate version involves creating another user for your Treo just for temporarily installing the new firmware. Normally the upgrade requires 15MB of free memory on the Treo 650, which would normally involve deleting all but a few programs. Instead, I just hotsynched by Treo, thus backing up all the files, then did a hard reset and installed the new firmware by creating a new user. Everything went perfectly save for one thing. Somehow at least a couple of the applications I used to have were missing once I restored everything from the old user. It could be there are others that I just am not recalling. These programs were small ones, so I am just going to download them, email them to myself, and reinstall them on the go.

So far, it’s been about 5 hours and I haven’t had any resets, which was one of the major isssues that this was supposed to fix. The other issues listed are:

• “Optimizes memory handling and frees up more memory with non-volatile files system improvements” - I now have almost 15MB free whereas before the upgrade I had a about 9MB.
• “Updates VersaMail to heighten stability and add improvements” - I really don’t care about this one since I use Marc Blank’s excellent ChatterEmail.
• “Overall voice quality improvements and enhanced call clarity” - I’ve never had a big problem with voice clarity, so I’m not sure if this is going to be a big difference for me.
• “Latest carrier settings files” - not sure about this. I use T-Mobile and never had an issue.
• “Bluetooth Headset Volume Increased” - again, this has never been an issue for me with my Pa1mOne Jabra BT250. My biggest problem with it is that it’s very sensitive to wind, and makes it impossible for the person on the other end to hear my voice if there’s much of any wind. Even the AC in the car does this if it’s pointed towards my head! Truly annoying. There’s nothing about that here, so my assumption is this will continue to be a problem and is probably something inherent in the headset and has nothing to do with the Treo.

I have noticed a couple of items not mentioned in the Updater notes. First of all, the buttons, particularly the red phone on/off button seems to be much more responsive. One of my big annoyances with the phone other than its resets and memory issues has been this button, which sometimes would stubbornly not work unless I hit it several times. Now I hit it once, it comes on, I hit it again, it goes off. Whew! No more breaking my thumb in order to turn the phone on! The other improvement is the volume of the speakerphone. This has been an annoyance since day one. The volume of the other party on the speakerphone was so low that it really wasn’t usable as a speakerphone! You had get your ear so close to it that you might as well just be using the non-speakerphone mode. After the update, the volume level seems to have increased by several times, thank goodness, so now it can be used as an actual speakerphone.

In all, I am very pleased with this update. While we can all hope for slick new functionality, all the niggly issues I had with this phone now seem to be gone, so at least now it works the way it should.

If you have an unlocked GSM Treo, go get this firmware NOW!

Not long ago, users of the Sprint-branded Treo 650 got an update that fixed some issues that have been annoying Treo 650 owners. Namely, the memory issue that caused much more memory to be consumed than for the Treo 600, and very low speakerphone volume levels. Now a version of the firmware for GSM Treo 650’s has been leaked via a Singapore Palm User Group. Users with Unlocked Treo 650’s as well as Cingular-branded Treo 650’s have been trying out this “test” version of the new 1.21 firmware. It seems a bit risky to be playing with an unaproved firmware version, but so far it looks like those who have successfully loaded it have had the same improvements to their memory and speakerphone volume as Sprint customers who’ve loaded their new firmware. So, for those who don’t want to play with this yet, just know that this bodes well for the update coming out for GSM phones in the near future. Stay tuned!

Update: There’s actually a detailed description posted by user 100th Monkey in the MyTreo.net Wiki, just in case you want to try this out.

Pa1mOne is giving away 144 Treo 650’s today! The giveaway started this morning at 9am and ends tonight at 9pm PDT. They are giving away one every five minutes so according to my calculations this leaves about 47 left to win. I don’t need another myself but I know of a few friends and family who would love to get their hands on one, so I’m giving it a shot myself. But don’t worry; I never win stuff like this!

Via TreoCentral.

Back to Content ConsumptionI’ve been struggling recently with keeping up with audio content. In general I prefer audio to text because, as I mentioned, I’m a slow reader and I can listen when I otherwise wouldn’t be able to read – such as exercising, driving, cooking, doing housework, etc. I can also speed up much of what I listen to via a feature on my Ipod. I can divide my listening into two main categories – talk and music. Within Music, I can listen to my collection of CD’s I’ve burned to MP3, or I can listen to a much larger collection of tracks from my Launchcast internet radio account. Within talk, I listen to podcasts, to audio books, and to traditional radio shows, primarily NPR. The biggest technical problem is that there are too many different formats which may or may not work on a single device or program. My burned music is in MP3, Launchcast streams Windows Media, and my Audio books are in a proprietary format that Audible.com uses. While podcasts are usually initially in MP3’s, I convert them to AAC in order to take advantage of the ability to have them play at faster speeds on my iPod.

All these different formats cause headaches, but are not insurmountable, at least on a computer. iTunes will play most of these, although it won’t do the Launchcast radio and I can’t install it at work. If I want portability, I can play MP3’s and Audio Books on my Treo 650, but no AAC files nor streaming Windows Media or Realmedia which would allow me to listen to Launchcast and NPR segments of my choosing – which I’ll elaborate a bit on below.

When it comes to NPR, or any radio show for that matter, there are ways of making it more portable than you initially would think, but it is not elegant or easy. I can listen to NPR shows on my Treo, but they are just streams from live broadcasts, not specific selections that I make from the archives. So what? Well, for one, why even bother with a Treo and just use a radio? Exactly my point! A radio is for live broadcasts, but the whole power behind digital devices like the Treo, the TiVo, the iPod, etc., is that they enable you to have a much greater say in the matter of when and how you watch or listen to something.

I did find a program for my PC that allows me to “timeshift” radio like a TiVo does TV and used it for a while to record numerous NPR shows which I then synced with my iPod. This software, called Replay Radio, does really seem to be useful, but it just wasn’t fleshed out enough for me. Maybe part of this had to do with the fact that I was telling it to record 9 hours of content a day! Ok, so maybe I was overdoing it a bit. But still, all this writing files to the hard drive and then optionally converting them to AAC was making my computer sluggish as well as taking up lots of storage space. Sure I could have archived some of this to CD or DVD, but that means yet more time spent managing files! Speaking of which, just managing the process could take a while. It’s not nearly as easy as recording and managing shows on TiVo. While there are a few hundred channels on TV, there are thousands upon thousands of potential radio stations, so actually compiling an accurate programming list of even a fraction of these is a monumental task! Still, if you need to timeshift radio programming, this is definitely a way to do it, just realize that depending on how much you record, the process of keeping everything straight (not to mention actually listening to the stuff!), may take up a considerable amout of time.

Not long ago, I discovered that at least some of the shows I was listening to from NPR have RSS feeds. The feeds present each report within a show like Morning Edition as a separate entry in the feed, so that you don’t have to listen to the entire program to find what you are interested in. You simply pick the ones in your newsreader that are of interest, and link to a page on NPR’s site which has a button to listen to a streaming version of just that segment. I can’t do this when I’m away from a computer as my Treo cannot download these streams or play these streams, but at least it cuts way down on the amount of time that I would have had to spend listening because… I can filter! Ideally I would like to see a way to listen to these on my Treo and/or the iPod, but this would either entail NPR producing streaming MP3’s in addition to the other formats, or to provide actual files to download ala podcasting (they do this already for On The Media, Future Tense, and Morning Stories, but that’s it), neither of which I think they will be doing any time soon. But hey, you never know!

Speaking of podcasting, there isn’t much of an issue here. I can transfer podcasts at home onto my iPod (or theoretically by Treo) and listen to them anywhere. If I haven’t been able to do this for a while, I can still listen to them by just downloading and playing them on any computer connected to the internet, or even theoretically doing this with my Treo, although personally I haven’t tried yet because the GPRS download speeds I can currently via T-Mobile are too slow.

The other main issue that I was grappling with recently was how to make all this audio accessible to me at home without a) having to be right next to the computer, or b) having constantly be walking around with headphones on. I’d seen these streaming media servers at some computer stores that intrigued me. These allow you to transmit audio files on your computer, or even internet radio to this device that you hook to the audio input jacks of your stereo. The communication between the device and your computer is via Wifi. Voila, you have an instant serious listening station to play your music and/or spoken word audio no matter where your computer is in the house related to your stereo.

So I went out and bought the SMC EZ-Stream Wireless Audio Adapter (SMCWAA-B). I was unable to determine prior to buying it whether it would play Launchcast radio, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The description on the box says that it’s compatible with Rhapsody, but I don’t use that. So, I bought it, brought it home and started struggling first with simply connecting it to my wifi network. I use WEP security to encrypt my network, and the user interface on the device was not very straightforward, so all this took a while to get working. The software that comes with the unit makes you install Musicmatch Jukebox in order to play MP3’s or WMA’s. Despite doing this, the unit couldn’t find some sample tracks I added to the Musicmatch library. Luckily, I found that one can download third-party server software, most notably TwonkyVision, which can greatly expland the initial capabilities of the software your device comes with. Initially TwonkyVision didn’t work either, so I had the idea to turn off my TiVo Home Networking Option, and all of a sudden success! Perhaps this was my problem with the original software not working as well. More importantly, though, TwonkyVision gave me access to my preferred audio software on my PC: iTunes. It was able to use my iTunes library to create basically a mirror of the same hierarchical menus that are on my iPod to navigate through tracks based on album, artist, genre, etc.. The only problem was that it would still only play MP3’s and WMA’s. No AAC’s, and no Audible files. Researching this further I found that the only media server that can currently play AAC’s is Airport Express with AirTunes. This would have been the perfect solution for me, except that of course this doesn’t play Launchcast radio! Argh!

And there’s the rub. It seems like no streaming media server out there is perfect in that it will let you stream any type of file or internet stream to your stereo. Certainly I don’t understand the intricate technical details in back of these technologies, but to me it seemed a fairly obvious product would be one that simply took the analog output of your computer’s sound card, converted it to digital bits, transmitted over a wifi connection to a device that could decode this into analog again to be output to the stereo. The media servers that exist allow for actual browsing through your music collection with a remote control and a visual textual display. This of course requires the device understand file types, directory structures, etc. What about simply a type of audio “modem,” if you will, that converts an analog stream into digital and then back into analog? It wouldn’t have the interactive ability to control things through the stereo – you would have to do that controlling on the PC side - but as far as I’m concerned, that’s icing.

I posited this question to the TwonkyVision forums over media-server.com as they seemed to have a lot of knowledgeable users and the main relevant suggestion I got was for a product that’s pretty different, but one that I decided to try out anyway.

The Radio Shack 2.4GHz Audio/Video Signal Sender/Receiver is something that looks like it was designed to share the signal coming from a dvd player, CD player, VCR, satellite receiver, etc., among stereos and/or TV’s in different rooms in a house. Its 2.4 GHz range seems to indicate some Wifi compatibility, but really it has nothing to do with Wifi, which is completely digital. Instead it is just an FM modulation transmitter/receiver that works on the same frequency as Wifi signals. You can only do so much research on the web, although it really depends on the device and who sells it. Radio Shack does not offer a way to review products on their site. The cost of it was low enough ($100) that I could just go buy it myself and if it didn’t meet my requirements, I could return it. So that’s what I did. Here are my impressions so far:

The device is actually two devices, a sender part and a receiver part. Both of these not only have to be plugged into a power outlet, but also have to be plugged into your computer and/or stereo. So what is in one way a “wireless” solution becomes one which also adds a lot more wires! The instructions are pretty sparse, as you can see (Radio Shack no longer has the manual available online), but there’s really not a whole lot to these things. You can operate them on four different “channels” and they not only have RCA stereo audio jacks, but also an RCA and coax video jack. I suppose with the video I could transmit stuff from my PC monitor if I had a video out on it. Alas, it is a non-multimedia laptop, so no such video out is available.

I was initially concerned that there would be interference between these and the Wifi I have in my house, but that seems to not be an issue. Whether this has to do with the different channels, I don’t know, but I just used the default channels for the device and there’s no interference like when I used to have a portable phone that worked on the 2.4 GHz frequency that would always toss all the computers off the network whenever we used it!

While there was no interference from Wifi, there was a lot of interference from other radio frequency sources. For example any time my cell phone rang, there was tons of crackling and other distortion, although of course the degree depended on how close the phone was to the transmitter or receiver. When the microwave was on there was some as well. As far as sound quality is concerned, it’s not bad, but with FM-Modulation, you are only getting FM-quality sound. This probably will not matter when it comes to spoken word, but for music, you can definitely tell the difference. The dynamic range is truncated so that you aren’t hearing the sounds that are on the extreme ends of bass and treble. Probably mostly bass because when I play music through these it sounds a bit tinny. I have to really play with equalization, but I know that even when I set loudness on and add additional bass and/or treble, that I’m simply stretching the information, not adding back in sound that’s been chopped off due to the smaller dynamic range. And I’m not an audiophile by any means. I can only imagine how horrible FM sounds to all those with more sensitive ears than mine!

Still, having a set of these sender/receivers is still the main option that fits at this point. I suppose if I got over my love of Launchcast, I could move on to the Airport Express, but as I’ve explained in the past, there is something inherently great about Launchcast that I so far have not found on any other internet radio platform – the ability for it to learn exactly what you like based on your own ratings and those of people who rate music similar to you – a kind of big social network based on music ratings that allows you to keep hearing new music that fits your taste even though you may have never known such music existed!

Another usage that the Radio Shack units allow for that I would not be able to get with a media server is something like Atmosphere, a background sound generator which I’ve talked about before which I really like. Of course I could record Atmosphere to an MP3 file and just play that over and over, but that would do away with some of the inherent randomness that Atmosphere has built into it.

As you can see, there are lots of options out there for those who want to listen to music and spoken word audio, and for many people one of those options will provide everything they want or need. Being somewhat picky about this stuff, of course, hurts the chances of this happening. We’re obviously still in the infancy of digital music when it comes to distribution mechanisms, portability, and compatibility. It may not seem like that with the iPod being around for close to five years and Internet Radio close to ten, but eventually there will need to be some consolidation in terms of formats and technologies or else many of us will have to continue to trudge along with multiple devices, multiple programs, tweaks and workarounds in order to enable us to play everything we want in every way we want, and any place we want.

Update: I’ve recently learned that Launchcast IS partnering with an equipment manufacturer to stream their content to stereos wirelessly. Philips Stremium brand devices apparently will do this. They are, however, very pricey compared to other media servers and I’m not quite sure why. The other problem is that currently Launchcast support is only for its genre stations and not for a user’s custom station. This really defeats the whole purpose. Apparently there are plans to get the custom station support working but I could not get any kind of timeline out of Launchcast folks. Without this support, I can’t see considering such a device, and even with this support I’m hard-pressed to spend such a huge premium just to get somewhat better quality over my current solutions. Of course these devices let you stream video as well, so if you have lots of digital video that you download off the net or create with your camcorder, this will allow you to transmit this stuff to your TV, but then you can do this with devices that cost a fraction of the price…

I know that most of my columns recently have been about the Treo and related software, so I apologize to those of you who aren’t Treo owners (potential or actual). But having recently upgraded to the 650, I can’t help but be fixated with the new and existing software out there which adds more functionality to the phone.

A couple of items in the news over the last day or so have caught my eye so I thought I’d share them and some brief thoughs.

First, over at MyTreo.Net, Marc Blank, the developer of ChatterEmail, is interviewed. I’ve owned ChatterEmail since an early beta came out last summer and it is the application I use by far the most on my Treo. Probably more than all other programs combined. You know how they say email is the killer app? Well, in my mind ChatterEmail is the killer email program for the Treo. I’d tried others like Snappermail, Versamail, the old standard mail program on the Treo 600, and a couple of others that I can’t recall the names of. ChatterEmail’s killer feature for me was push, which is instant notification of emails, ala the Blackberry. If you are coming from a Blackberry and want that experience, ChatterEmail is the only one to provide it at this point - or at least the only affordable one. The one item keeping people away from ChatterEmail is that it’s only IMAP, and many email hosts still only support POP. But in this interview Marc talks about his next beta that will for the first time support POP. He also makes some interesting technical points about the inefficiency of POP and how we should all be using IMAP if at all possible. Marc is a great guy, truly devoted to his customers. Even during the holidays this year he was continually churning out new beta versions with fixes and additional functionality on almost a daily basis!

Over at Treonauts, Andrew has been polling readers and researching himself the different PIM options for the Treo. PIM standing for Personal Information Manager and relating to the “core” applications of the original Palm platform which are still available on the Treo - the Calendar, Contact List, To-Do List, and Memo Pad. For anyone who needs their Treo to keep them organized, these apps are critical. The ones that come standard with the Treo are ok, but pretty basic. They get the job done for anyone who doesn’t have thousands of contacts, is a sales person, or is just incredibly anal! However, a bunch of different 3rd party apps expand greatly on these and Andrew has a good rundown on them. Personally I still use the built-in apps and part of the reason is that many of the 3rd party ones require several megs of memory, something that is in short supply on the Treo 650. Aside from which I simply don’t have a very hectic schedule, I’m horrible at keeping up with a to-do list, and my contacts number around 200 or so. I simply don’t need something as full-featured as many of these are.

Finally, I recently happened upon a new product which to me may rival ChatterEmail as my killer app. I think I’ll hold off on talking about it right now because I’m still evaluating it and want to do a full write-up and review, which will take some time. Hopefully I will have something for you within a few days…

As a gadget lover AND a map lover, I have long had a passion for GPS, or Global Positioning System devices. These allow you to know where you are on the planet within a fair degree of accuracy, allow you to map out a route from where you are to any destination and sometimes even let you look up various landmarks or businesses or see them as you travel. My first GPS was a monochrome Garmin StreetPilot that I bought back in 2000. When I first heard that I could make my Treo 600 act like a GPS receiver back last summer, I was entreagued. When I heard the raves about a product called Mapopolis that offered voiced turn-by-turn directions and the ability to download maps for anywhere in the U.S., all for half the price I paid (including the actual GPS receiver) for the StreetPilot years earlier, I jumped at the chance! The possibility that I could use this amazing phone for yet another important need made it even more of a convergence device. At the time, Mapopolis provided the only real GPS solution that I could find for the Treo. I purchased the program and a subscription to download maps for a year and started using it immediately. Mapopolis provided many things that my Garmin (which was at least five times the size and weight of my Treo) could not do, such as those voice-prompted directions I mentioned, displaying maps in color (albeit on a smaller screen) and allowing you to actually type addresses in instead of scrolling through a virtual keyboard on the screen.

While I was mostly happy with this software, the one big disadvantage was that Mapopolis’s maps were county-based. You had to know what counties you would be traveling to or through if you wanted to get specific directions to an exact endpoint, and also be able to stop along the way and drive around a little without losing your map detail. Unless you are on a truely long-term trek, you are going from point A to point B, so really you only need the county-level map for where you start and where you end for a good set of directions. The other set of maps you need are state-level maps that contain the “major roads” for the states you will be traveling in. In any case, if I wanted to use Mapopolis during a trip, I would have to sit down with a map and figure out which states and counties I wanted access to. Initially I tried simply putting in all the counties between me and my destination of some 500 miles away, but due to the limitations of the program, this was unworkable. These maps are not small, of course, and with the Treos limited memory, the best place for them are on an external memory card.

Luckily, when I purchased Mapopolis last summer they had just made a beta version available that made it possible to use maps on your SD card more or less painlessly. However, using the SD card, especially on a Treo 600 (as opposed to faster devices like the Treo 650), meant things generally took longer to happen. Every additional map that Mapopolis had to load and look at while figuring out your route made trips with more than a handful of county-level maps and state major road maps so slow that they really weren’t worth the effort. And even with a relatively small mapset, it could still take a few minutes to map my route to work ? a trip that only takes a half hour!

Flash forward six months or so when I first started contemplating buying a Treo 650 (ok, maybe I was contemplating it when it was first announced in October!). One consideration I had, although admittedly not my primary one, was how upgrading would affect my experience with GPS. I knew that the Treo 650’s faster processor would mean that maps would load much faster and routes could be planned much more quickly ? at least in theory. I also knew that with its higher resolution screen, I could see more map in more detail, thus giving me a better idea of what was ahead as I drove, and what was around me.

I didn’t think at all about the Treo 650’s support for Bluetooth because I simply didn’t know that there were Bluetooth-enabled GPS units. Even if I did, I don’t think I would have been all that concerned because after all it’s simply a way to cut down on the numbers wires in your car, a feature that while nice is not a big deal to someone who’s relatively low maintenance like myself! Then again, one big problem I had when using the Treo 600 with my wired GPS receiver was that sometimes a bump would dislodge a cable and if I didn’t get it plugged back in quickly enough, I would have to reroute the trip all over again!

Not having done a lot of reading about GPS since buying Mapopolis in the summer, I just assumed I would keep using my old GPS receiver with the Mapopolis maps. I didn’t know there were other options until perusing the discussion forums again as the time neared for when I might actually be able to purchase the Treo 650. I happened across people talking about a new product from a company called TomTom. TomTom makes a stand-alone GPS unit called the “TomTom Go” which I had looked at a bit and even considered buying when I was looking at stand-alones last month after buying a new car. However, the TomTom’s pricetag, even though it was one of the cheaper units out there for its full feature set, was still between $600 and $1000 depending on the store you bought it at and the options you chose, and since I knew I’d be spending a good chunk of cash on the Treo 650 soon enough, I had to hold off. I’m glad I did, because as I found out, TomTom makes software for handhelds (PalmOS and PocketPC devices) that is the basically the same as what is in their stand-alone TomTom Go. The price is also much more reasonable than any of the stand-alone devices you can get, including TomTom’s.

What I also had to decide was what kind of GPS receiver to buy, because as it turned out I could not use my old GPS receiver with the Treo 650 due to Pa1mOne’s decision to change the port used for plugging in such accessories to the phone. Since Bluetooth GPS receivers are not prohibitive and because I heard good things about TomTom’s own Bluetooth GPS receiver, which came either separately or bundled with the software and maps, I opted to get the bundle from Amazon.com and have it shipped to my house for free while I waited for my Treo 650 to get out of backorder status and get shipped to me. As it turns out TomTom’s Bluetooth receiver has some of the latest GPS features, accuracy and performance enhancements via a recent chipset called “SiRF IIe/LP.” (I believe an even more advanced SiRF III has just gone into production) Among its more impressive features is its ability to get a GPS signal without having to have line-of-sight to the satellites. So I can put it in my glove compartment, and since there are no wires, shut it, and it still will get a signal and send it to my Treo 650.

After receiving the TomTom package and actually getting the software to work on my Treo 600 (a feat that I hadn’t seen anyone even attempting), I found out that Mapoplis actually made a product that was a more direct competitor to TomTom! It was too late to return TomTom and do further research before making a decision, so I contacted Mapopolis and they were nice enough to send me their product so that I could review it for potential customers and compare it to the TomTom Navigator software and maps. Mapopolis’s product, called U.S. NavCard for PalmOS, is actually an external Secure Digital memory card that contains the software and street-level maps for the entire U.S. One can also buy cards that contain only parts of the U.S. for significantly less. I felt compelled to compare the two products not only for myself but for others out there who are looking for a new (or a first) GPS system for their Treo and who may not have known about the Mapopolis product - while there’s been more buzz lately about TomTom because of it being the new kid on the block and having some nice features, I didn’t see much discussion about this relatively new product from Mapopolis.

Installation

The Mapopolis Navcard is the winner here, of course. All you do is plop the card in. The first time it installs some files into your Treo’s main memory (subsequent insertions just cause it to start right up) but all the maps are maintained on the card itself, which is necessary for a device with such a limited amount of main memory. While this is process is very easy, there are some downsides to the approach. One is that the files that it installs in memory take up a pretty good chunk of space ? over 3MB! With the Treo 650’s memory issues, this is significant! Also, while using the Navcard, you won’t have access to programs that you may have installed on a separate external memory card. I’ve put as many programs as possible on my external card in order to keep the free the main memory on the Treo due to it’s memory issues. But perhaps this isn’t that big an issue. If you are using a GPS during a trip, for the most part you aren’t going to be doing anything with the Treo, aside from maybe using the phone which doesn’t require any external program. Ideally, having at least the possibility open for doing other things like playing some music or audio books that are on a memory card while using the GPS would be nice, but the lack of multitasking on the Treos as well as lack of great stability with either of these products mean that this was never going to be a real possibility at this point anyway. Initially I thought having the software on an SD card meant that it wasn’t meant for updates, however, Mapopolis is currently working on updates that can be installed on the card, and I tried out a beta of this update successfully ? you just need to switch the write-protect tab on the SD card.

TomTom Navigator’s installation is not nearly as straightforward. One receives Eight CD’s worth of maps, voices, and the application. Any of these CD’s acts as an installation program, but nothing gets installed on your computer. Rather, when you put one of these CD’s in, it runs an installation program off of the CD and asks you want you want to install. It gives you the choice of installing in main memory, on a storage card or “other (advanced)” That third option then gives you further choices to install to a directory on your hard drive (which you can later transfer to an SD card via a card reader for example), or directly to the SD card. All these options are a bit confusing and I had to play with the install process a bit before I got it to work the way I wanted. Installing to Storage Card initially did not let me have access to the application. I had to go back and install it to main memory, but then it took up a big chunk of memory. I then deleted this, and tried installing to the storage card again and this time it seemed to work. The process also seems to require at least a couple of hotsynchs so you really need to play close aattention to the directions the installer is giving you and don’t just assume you hit install and then do one hotsynch. The reason I knew there shouldn’t be a big chunk of memory taken up in the Treos main memory is from what I’d read on the discussion forums. Nowhere is any of this explained during the installation process or in the manuals.

Once you install the program itself, you also have to install maps. You can install a map for a single state, or for groups of states. This is relatively painless, as you just select from a list and it will prompt you to insert a different CD if necessary. You can also install a large variety of voices for the voice prompts. Unfortunately installing each map and each voice prompt requires a separate install process, and you have to basically tell TomTom that you’ve hotsynched when you really haven’t, otherwise you would have to hotsynch after each one!

Documentation

The documentation for both of these units is not the best. The Navcard comes with one sheet of paper that with some basic instructions. A “Quickstart Guide” which isn’t much longer but at least as some screen captures, is available on the Mapopolis website. Mapopolis is apparently working on an a more in-depth user guide, but in the mean time the user guide for Mapopolis 2 will serve to answer most of your questions. TomTom’s “manual” is a slick, professional printing, but is not all that thorough. It definitely beats Mapopolis’s single sheet, and one can download a slightly expanded User Guide from the TomTom website that’s a bit more helpful. Unfortunately, TomTom includes no documentation for their Bluetooth GPS unit, which was part of the bundle; something I thought was a bit odd.

GPS Unit Compatibility

Surprisingly, I found that the Mapopolis product was much easier to get working with the TomTom Bluetooth GPS unit than TomTom’s Navigator. Once I figured out that you needed to set it so that it would always look for the GPS as soon as you enter the program, and also set the it for a Bluetooth GPS (as opposed to a serial GPS) connection, it worked flawlessly. You do have to pick the TomTom from list of Bluetooth devices each time you start it up ? the Navcard can’t seem to remember which device you set it to the last time - but this is not much of a hassle.

The TomTom, on the other hand, was much more finicky. I would have to exit out sometimes or go in and change the GPS setting because it just wasn’t finding the device. I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, but it can be quite annoying. Once TomTom sees the GPS, everything’s fine, but it just seemed to take a much longer time than necessary sometimes. Other times it picked it up right away, and unlike Mapopolis, it remembers your settings, so as soon as you start running the software sometimes you’re all set and don’t need to do anything more to get things working.

Planning a Route

This is one place where the TomTom Navigator outperforms Mapopolis in most, although not every aspect. The interface to TomTom is one that doesn’t look anything like any PalmOS application that you’ve seen, and that is because it is not exactly a PalmOS application. Instead, TomTom uses its own environment, bypassing the PalmOS. You start by choosing what kind of destination to pick, including an address, your home (if you’ve programmed that in when prompted when you are first setting TomTom up), a destination you’ve navigated to recently, a “Favorite,” (predefined location), a “Point of Interest,” or just an address. For now, let’s look at just a plain old address as your destination. First you are asked what city your destination is in. You can start typing with the Treo keyboard or with a virtual one on the screen. As you type, a list of cities pops up that correspond to what you’ve typed so far, and as you continue typing that lists gets smaller, since, for example, fewer cities start with “Spring” than start with just “S.” Once you see and pick your city from the list, it then asks you what street your destination is on and a similar list comes up as you type out the street. Finally it asks for the number or a cross-street. The routing system also remembers the last place you routed to, and so when you first start to route again, it brings up a list of recent places, so that you can quickly choose that place without having to manually enter it again from scratch.

(Clicking on “Navigate To” on the Main Menu will give you these options)

(When you click on “Address” you can start entering the city name to bring up a list)

Without actually experiencing it yourself, it’s hard to get a feel for how easy setting a destination is, compared to many GPS systems I’ve used in the past, but trust me; it is very fast and easy. The actual amount of time it takes for the TomTom software to create the route with all the directions is astonishingly fast. Routing my 35-minute same-county trip from home to work or back takes less than 3 seconds. Even mapping a trip from Virginia to New York took around 5 seconds! In addition to your straightforward route, TomTom has the ability to include a “waypoint” or a point in between the beginning and the end points through which you want to travel, even if this will take you out of your way based on the optimal route. As a waypoint you can pick any address, favorite, a recent destination, point of interest, etc. I’ve never personally found a big reason to use waypoints while driving, but my trips are usually pretty straightforward ? go visit a family member or friend, come home.

For those who have used Mapopolis 2 with the Treo 600, you will be right at home with the Mapopolis NavCard. The NavCard has basically the same exact interface with a few minor differences. The only major difference is that you don’t have to fiddle with maps, map directories, etc. (There are also a couple of features that have been left out but I’ll get into that later) - in fact the “Maps” button in the settings menu is simply gone. This is because you already have all the maps at your disposal preinstalled on the SD card. The screen that lets you pick where to route to is definitely one of Mapopolis’s weakest points. It’s not intuitive, and takes a bit of fiddling with to get what you want. It’s something that you can get over as you get more accustomed to using it, but it is certainly an area where Mapopolis could make some big improvements. For example, there’s the issue that while looking for an address, you may have missed the pull-down list where you specify which state to look in, a particularly annoying problem. For some reason, when you go to set an address to find, it defaults to looking in Malibu, California. A better choice would be to use a recent destination city or even the current city according to the GPS. In addition, Mapopolis seems very finicky about addresses. For example spelling out East or Lane instead of abbreviating these yielded a “nothing found” message. This may be even be true of TomTom as well, but because of the way it works by offering you choices rather than having you input an address to find an exact match for, it avoids the issue.

(notice no “Maps” button)

(intermediate screen - you have to click “find” to set up your destination)

That being said, Mapopolis does have some routing features that aren’t available in TomTom. In particular you can look up someone’s name in your address book and it will plop their address into the find field. Of course, it only does this for their actual address. You still need to make sure you are looking for it in the proper city and state (or zip code), since these are in separate fields from the address, and setting these each time is not a very fast and easy process. You can also tell Mapopolis to avoid highways, favor them, or be neutral to them when creating a route, something TomTom cannot do. Neither program has the flexibility of the online programs that allow you to find the shortest route vs. the quickest route. Routing times for Mapopolis, while a lot faster using the Navcard on my Treo 650 than with the county-level maps with Mapopolis 2 on my Treo 600, is still significantly slower than the TomTom. Routes from Virginia to New York took at least 30 seconds, perhaps as much as a minute, whereas routes between a local computer store and my house about two miles away took about 5 seconds. The route from my house to work (a 30-minute ride within the same county) took about 10 seconds. Mapopolis, however, is working on an update that improves routing and searching speeds. I was able to look at the beta for this update and for a longer route (DC to NYC) it did seem to shave it down from about 1 minute to 30 seconds, but shorter routes that took 10 seconds or less with the regular version didn’t seem to gain much discernable benefit.

Traveling the Route

Once you set off on your route, the main features available are the actual screen display of the map, the written directions and other information, and finally the audible voice prompts. Oh yes, and then there’s the overriding accuracy of the directions themselves! Let’s tackle these one by one.

For the written directional information, I preferred the Mapopolis, both because their color scheme of blue letters on a white background was more readable from a distance than TomTom’s white on dark blue. Both applications have directional arrows that tell you what kind of turn is coming and how far you have to go till the turn, and for these Mapopolis’s seemed a bit easier to read. Part of the reason why Mapopolis might have the edge here is that these instructions take up more screen real estate and so allow for bigger and clearer fonts. This has the disadvantage, though, of making the space taken up by the map smaller. TomTom does have a nice feature though which allows you to see only the directional arrow and the direction text over the entire screen, making it even more readable than Mapopolis (although unlike Mapopolis it shows absolutely no map). You can set this on or off, or even to come on automatically when you travel above a certain speed.

(Mapopolis NavCard Navigating a Route)

(TomTom Navigator Navigating a Route - using its 3D Map Mode)

As far as directional accuracy, I found that both programs would sometimes give directions that didn’t make sense, or that I just wasn’t expecting. Normally these will actually get you to where you want to go, but they often seem less intuitive than what you may be used to just guessing yourself. Sometimes they might even save you a bit of time, sometimes they might take longer. I think it would take weeks to determine with any kind of confidence whether one of these products are better at figuring out directions on whole better than the other, although you might be able to do that very quickly for a given area and set of routes that you travel on a regular basis. The other issue that both seem to have (although in different places) is that they occasionally give you directions where none are needed. I’ve gotten stuff like “in 1 mile continue along X” where X is the road I’m currently on. However, looking around, there’s no way NOT to continue along X unless you want to barrel through some guardrail and off the side of the road! Much of this depends on the type of mapping data that these programs use. Mapopolis uses data from NavTeq, whereas TomTom uses data from a company called TeleAtlas. Both of these companies have one annoying problem for me ? they put my house 5 houses east of where it should be! I even notified NavTeq about this error, but even though the big online mapping apps like Mapquest use NavTeq data (so you think they would have the latest), they still show my house incorrectly placed. I can only imagine how many other inaccuracies there are, especially for never roads ? my road (and house) is at least 50 years old so I don’t think that’s the problem there!

A closely related aspect to this is how the directions are actually explained to the driver. For this Mapopolis is the hands-down winner. They simply make more sense to my U.S. roadmapped brain. TomTom is a Dutch company, so perhaps in Europe these kinds of directions might be more comfortable, but not as much in the U.S. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t that bad, but Mapopolis’s are just more descriptive and helpful. Also, while you can set TomTom to use miles instead of kilometers, when you get under 1/3 of a mile or so, it switches to yards, a measurement that is only familiar in the sense of football to most U.S. residents! Unfortunately there is no way to switch this to feet, which is the unit that Mapopolis uses for its sub 1/3-mile directions.

As far as the map part of the display, TomTom is probably the winner, but not by much when you consider all the related features. On TomTom the maps just look better to my eye, are faster to browse, scroll better, and zoom in and out more fluidly. In addition one can choose from the standard overhead view that one would see on a paper map, or a special “3-D” view, as if one were traveling in a plane above the vehicle. Initially I was a bit dubious about whether this feature would actually be very useful. In fact I felt that these views gave you less information because you couldn’t see as far ahead. But this is not the case with TomTom’s 3D view. Something about the way it uses perspective and the fluidity of it’s animation really add to this view to allow you to sense what’s coming up in front of you much easier than with the top-down type of map. I still think the top-down view is good and switch off between the two, but having the choice is great. A slick feature that TomTom has but which I wish there was a way to turn off is a type of “auto-zooming.” Depending on how fast the car is going, TomTom senses this and zooms out in order to give you a wider view of what’s to come. If one is zoomed in too much while, say stopped in traffic, one can override this and zoom out for a wider view, however within several seconds TomTom will automatically zoom back in to a “speed-appropriate” level. TomTom’s map display while on a route is also a bit larger due to more space given to the directional text for Mapopolis’s display. However, when using these programs just driving around without a route programmed, Mapopolis’s map display is a bit larger.

Mapopolis’s maps are a bit jerkier when animating your travels, and are not as “pretty,” although I suppose that’s in the eye of the beholder. There is no 3D view, even though the older Mapopolis 2 has such a view. I’m not sure why Mapopolis chose to leave it out. Perhaps there were stability issues or even memory issues due to the size limits of the SD card and the Treo 650’s main memory issues. Also missing from Mapopolis 2 is the ability to control the amount of detail on the map, but then TomTom doesn’t have this either. Mapopolis does have some things that TomTom doesn’t. For one, you can scroll on the map while you are traveling a route, zoom out to view more of your route, and even click on parts of the map to get more information about them ? the name of a park or a point of interest, etc. In order to do something similar in TomTom, you have to go into a separate Browse Map mode found in the menu, which is just a static view of the map, not a dynamic one showing your position as you travel. Mapopolis also allows you to choose whether the map should be oriented according to the direction your car is driving, or rather as a static North-Up orientation. Finally, Mapopolis gives you a legend that puts things in perspective. You can estimate how far it might be from where you are to an arbitrary spot on your route which you cannot do in TomTom. As mentioned, the written directions take up more space on Mapopolis than TomTom, so the map itself is smaller, which makes it harder to read while driving.

Both applications give you an audible voice that reads turn-by-turn directions as they near. This is a key feature because it allows you to be directed by just listening without having to look at a tiny screen to try to make out directional information. Both programs distinguish themselves in different ways with their voice prompts, and so I had a hard time determining a clear winner.

TomTom has a large variety of clear, human voices which you can install from the CD (or download additional from Navtones) so that you can pick and choose which voice to hear at any given time. There are usually at least two (one male, one female) voice for a given language, but sometimes as many as four. So if you know where you’re going but want to practice your Italian comprehension a bit, just download Chiara and let her direct you Avante! Aside from this, there are even different accent variations (for English anyway), including U.S., British,