Yet another marvellous gadget-frontier to push back… I have been looking for a GPS for some time, since a friend of mine got me interested in Geocaching. The problem is that this seems to be one of those items, like digital cameras, which undergo a mysterious non-tax-related price-hike upon entering the country.
*sneeze*pricefixing*/sneeze*
Anyhoo, having decided that it would be a couple of paychecks before I could afford a $240 Garmin etrex GPS, I was morosely re-examining the ridiculously low price for which I could buy such a device from Amazon if I lived in the USA, and it occurred to me to check the price of GPS units on ebay. I had looked at bluetooth GPS units (Since I already own a Palm Tungsten) in the past and ruled them out on grounds of cost. Almost the first link I saw when browsing GPS on ebay however, was this lovely bluetooth GPS, with a buy-it-now price of AU$119!
I suspect, on examining the market for these things further, that the trick is that this device requires no user-interface or special modularity. It just has to perfrom a well-documented task, namely receiving a GPS signal, and squirt the resulting low-speed (9600 baud) data over a convenient bluetooth link (again, a single IC will do it all). Since I already own the expensive bit (the Palm), this brings the cost down to something much more reasonable, with the added bonus that the GPS itself will continue to work in my future gadgets, so long as they support bluetooth.
…still, it ain’t gonna happen this paycheck.