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by Simon Brown.
Original Post: First impressions of the Garmin iQue 3600
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I visited my parents over Christmas and my dad gave me a demo of his new Garmin iQue 3600. It's basically a PDA running Palm OS that comes complete with an integrated GPS (global positioning system) solution. I was so impressed that I had to go out and buy one. Okay, I didn't have to buy one, but it's certainly going to come in useful now that I've moved house and drive around much more than I did before. And besides, it's Christmas!
If you buy it in the UK, you get detailed maps for all of western Europe, and much of that seems to go right down to street level. Of course, there's no way that you'll get all of that detail onto the onboard 32Mb of memory, so thankfully the device takes SD cards. So far I've managed to get about half of the UK onto a 128Mb card. The only real caveat is that Garmin doesn't support the Mac and all map generation and installation has to be done via the native Windows apps that Garmin supply on the installation CDs. Incidently, installation was a breeze and not that much different from a regular Palm (now palmOne) device.
If you do a search on the web for iQue Mac OS X then you'll find a whole load of links and discussions about Mac compatibility and how Macs just aren't supported, even with Virtual PC. However, after a short time scanning through all this stuff, I stumbled across some instructions about how to get the core data (i.e. address book, calendar and todo list) synced with Palm Desktop running on the Mac (and subsequently Apple iSync via the iSync Palm Conduit) thanks to some of the people over at the PDA Street forums. Essentially, you have to modify 3 XML config files that get installed as part of Palm Desktop for Mac. It was very easy to do and worked first time! See this thread for more details.
I was planning to buy a PDA in the new year and now I have something that is far more useful and that I'm likely to carry around. It's not that much bigger than most PDAs and has a fantastic screen. As far as the PDA side goes, you get the basic apps that are supplied with all Palm OS based PDAs - an address book, calendar, todo list, etc. The GPS side is much, much richer though and in conjunction with the maps that you install, you can link address book entries to physical locations, plan routes and then be directed along those routes by graphical and vocal prompts. The mapping database also contains thousands and thousands of "points of interest" that you can search upon in various ways. For example, you can search for petrol stations that are near your location. Also included are transportation links, hospitals, hotels, museums, restaurants, shopping centres, etc. There really is far too much to mention so I'd recommend looking at one of the various reviews that are scattered around the web.
The only real downsides are (apparently) the battery life and that fact that it doesn't support wireless connectivity such as Bluetooth or Wifi. The car kit (aka automotive navigation kit) is excellent though and charges the iQue from the cigarette lighter while keeping it sitting steady on the dashboard. All in all this is a great bit of kit and getting it to sync with my PowerBook is a bonus!
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