Garmin-Asus have announced the Garmin-Asus A10, a touchscreen smartphone running on the Android  platform that is optimized for pedestrian and in-car navigation. The A10 is expected to be available in mid-2010 in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

For those times when walking is the best way to go, the A10 is ideal for city navigation because of its bright, 3.2-inch HVGA touch screen, electronic compass and long-lasting 1500mAh battery. As with other Garmin-Asus Android-powered devices, the A10’s GPS capabilities are optimized to ensure that customers have the best location and navigation experience a smartphone can offer. Detailed maps are preloaded on the A10 so that users do not have to pay and wait for third party maps to download from a server, nor will they lose their turn-by-turn, voice-prompted navigation if they are out of cell phone coverage. In addition to pedestrian navigation, the A10 is ready for use in an automobile out-of-the-box, and it comes with a powered audio mount that magnifies the volume of the device’s voice commands.

The A10 is a full-featured smartphone on the Android platform that integrates Google  Mobile Services with one-click access to Google Maps , Gmail , YouTube , calendar, contacts and Android Market , where users can find more than 30,000 applications to expand and personalize their phone to fit their lifestyle. Android applications that include location-centric content are also able to utilize the A10’s enhanced GPS capability.

To optimize a user’s ability to stay in touch with family, friends and business contacts, the A10 is compatible with Microsoft Exchange server and will wirelessly synchronize contacts, calendar and enterprise email. Account setup is quick and easy, and in a few simple steps users will have their contacts, calendar and email ready to go.

Additional A10 smartphone features include a powerful WebKit browser with multi-touch, five mega-pixel camera including auto-focus capability that automatically geotags images with an exact location reference. The built-in accelerometer will quickly change the display so that screens may be viewed in portrait or landscape mode.

The A10 also supports optional cityXplorer  maps, which makes it possible to plan and use routes that include public transit options such as bus, tramway, metro and suburban rail systems.

The Garmin-Asus A10 is expected to be available in mid-2010 in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Additional information about Garmin-Asus products is available at GarminAsus.com.

Article from easier.com

Tags: Asus, Garmin, smartphone

Garmin have announced the discontinuation of many of their cheaper trail GPSrs.

This includes the beginner’s eTrex as well as the Colorado 400 series GPS receivers.  This has possibly been caused by the boom in cheap phone GPSrs.

Look forward to some cheap GPS receivers coming to a store near you.

Discontinued Garmin GPSrs here.

Tags: Colorado 400, eTrex, Garmin, gps

I just found a great little WordPress plugin (via Podcacher Podcast) to display your geocaching stats on a WordPress blog. You can add a widget in the sidebar (see the left sidebar) or you can use short codes to display you stats (see the bottom half of the About me page).

You can download the plugin from the WordPress site. If you need help or info about the plugin, see the author’s site.

Two mistakes I made when trying to use this plugin: you need to upload the gpx file, not the zip file and when using the shortcode to insert stats, there must be no spaces between the ‘[‘ and the text.

“Happy Hunting!”

Tags: gcStats, plugin, statistics, stats

I still haven’t been out doing much in the way of Geocaching lately, this time due to the fact that I pulled a hamstring playing rugby 2 weeks ago. But, as they say in the classics, “Idle hands are the Devil’s tools”, so I’ve been working on something else in the geocaching field.

This is my first ever attempt at writing a macro for GSAK. I have no experience at all, but managed to piece this together from bits and pieces that I found on the GSAK website

The macro will take your finds from GSAK and create a banner from the data. You can then take the HTML created and paste this into your GC.com or GCA.com profile.

Why, I hear you say? Because I was tired of pasting a GC.com banner AND a GCA.com banner into my profile. And if you use GSAK for Waymarking, these stats will be included too!

If you want to see the result before you download the macro, looky see here.

Download file here. (http://snurl.com/hjl6j)

Tags: banner, GSAK, macro, software

Thought I’d show off a little gadget that I made on Widgetbox.com. It’s basically an RSS feed of the latest caches placed in Victoria. Feel free to stick it on your website.

Get the Latest caches in Victoria widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox!

Tags: software, widget