Iguidance and some a request for advice.

(1) FYI: I've been using iGuidance 3.0 with and Hp iPAQ5555 and a iBT
Bluetooth GPS receiver for about 6 months. I find it to be quirky and
unintuitive when using the "Route Options" The menu choices are: Quickest,
Major, Shortest, and Local". Quickest and Shortest drive me nuts since it
doesn't do a reliable job of picking either the Quickest or the Shortest. I
still don't know the difference between Major and Local since most of the
Local road in the Washington, D.C. area are also Major roads.

In short, I can't recommend iGuidance. It was a poor choice on my part.
There's got to be much better programs out there!

If you're having good luck with another program, I would appreciate your
opinion and recommendations. Being able to plan a trip on my pc would be a
nice feature that iGuidance doesn't support. MS Streets and Trips was ok
for the 2004 version on the PC, but transferring it to my Pocket PC was
really lame because the map size was so limited. I don't know, but I've
heard that the newest MS versions is even weaker.

(Something that I didn't expect on iGuidance, but I would like to see is a
set of route choices with maps from my present location to a designated
location. That way, I could scroll through and select the quickest route or
the back-road route when I'm sight seeing in the mountains.)

(3) Is there a cheap ($10-$25) or a freeware program that would allow me to
use my iPAQ and GPS receive to track my position as I go hiking so that I
could follow the same route out as the one I came in. I would also like to
be able to take coordinates from a topo map to set waypoints so that I could
hike to a specific location. I know relatively little about such programs
so it would need to come with pretty explicit instructions or be very
intuitive.

Thanks ...john in burke, va

Sorry Item # 3 should be #2. I have a problem with counting.

...john

John in Burke, VA wrote:

I tried iGuidance and it failed me miserably too. I used Tom Tom
Navigator 5 for a couple of years and really liked that. It has all the
features you want I think. It has a trip planning mode and will also do
"Itineraries" which are multiple destination routes that can give you
full control of routing.

It has a very user friendly touchscreen interface. One thing I thought
was a shortcoming is that it does not display or record tracks. And it
does not have a PC application that can be used for pre-planning routes


Ozi Explorer-CE can use the free for the downloading USGS topo maps. It
requires some effort in preparing and converting the maps but does a
good job.

Here is a page with some third party softwares, you might find something
suitable there, it has a link to the Ozi Explorer pages:

http://gpsinformation.net/#3rdparty

Jack

--
Jack Erbes in Ellsworth, Maine, USA (jackerbes at adelphia dot net)
(also receiving email at jacker at midmaine dot com)

Wait until you see that in action on a sub notebook or laptop


2006 version has voice drving command. But with a catch as detailed
below. It is a poor man driving gps software and particularly
suitable if you use it out of state or province say a couple of time a
year only. It is seamless with no zone segregation and cover the
whole of US & Canada


Yes you can do that even with iGudance 1, 2 not to mention Version 3
You have to MAP the location (start) and you NAV (end) and use route
option to find the best route you want


S&T 06 are cheap enough. I have skip 07 version. It has voice
driving guidance as well.
But once you are off track, you have to press F3 (re route). That is
pain when you are driving and trying to find the F3 key to press. It
is only good when you have another passenger handling the laptop/
subnotbook. iGuidance or TT or Garmin (full blown driving software)
will to the rerouting rightaway. Notwithstanding that it is really
cheap and its POI is best of all (in sheer numbers and details)

I cannot answer all of your question. Hope these help

Daniel, Toronto