Garmin Mobile PC

Garmin’s Intuitive Navigation on Laptops

Olathe, Kansas, January 3, 2008 — Garmin International, Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd., today announced Garmin Mobile PC, a navigation package that turns laptops and other mobile PCs into powerful navigators. Garmin Mobile PC was announced in conjunction with the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and will be on display at the Garmin booth (#35832, South Hall 4).

“Garmin Mobile PC gives travelers an easy and inexpensive way to get more from a device they already own – their laptop,” said Dan Bartel, Garmin’s vice president of worldwide sales. “Plus, it offers many of the same real-time features found on high-end portable GPS devices like weather and fuel price information.”

Garmin Mobile PC features the same easy-to-use “Where to?” and “View map” interface found on the Garmin nüvi® and StreetPilot®. With a few clicks, customers can quickly search and route to addresses or nearly six million points of interest like restaurants, hotels, attractions, gas stations and more. In addition, customers can navigate to Outlook contacts stored on their laptop.

Garmin Mobile PC is available in two configurations – a software only package and a bundle with software and Garmin’s new GPS 20x sensor. The software only version is compatible with broadband modems, as well as internal or third-party GPS receivers that provide the industry standard NMEA GPS data via serial or Bluetooth connections. The bundled version includes the new GPS 20x, a high sensitivity GPS sensor with a USB connection. The lightweight GPS 20x has non-skid pads for dash mounting and is less than two inches in length.

Garmin Mobile PC offers much more than traditional trip planning. Users can use their laptop to receive turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions to their destination, similar to Garmin’s traditional portable navigation devices. If a turn is missed along the way, Garmin Mobile PC will automatically recalculate the route and get them back on track.

Thanks to the route shaping feature, users can select specific roads they want to travel and customize their route to avoid certain roads and geographic areas. Drivers wanting to keep track of their previous route can utilize the track log feature and see an electronic bread crumb trail that shows exactly where they traveled. Garmin Mobile PC also includes a trip computer automatically records trip data.

Garmin Mobile PC also provides free access to Garmin Online services. This real-time, internet data service simplifies trip planning by providing live weather, flight status, hotel rates (U.S. only), fuel prices (U.S. only) and safety camera data (Europe only, with subscription).

The Garmin Mobile PC with GPS 20x bundle will be available in April for a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $99.99. The software only version of Garmin Mobile PC is expected to be available for a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $59.99.

Vu sur GNT... Peut-on s'attendre à ce que ce logiciel offre plusieurs langues comme les autres GPS Garmin ???

" Après avoir lancé un logiciel de navigation pour smartphones et PDA, le spécialiste des solutions GPS Garmin propose la même chose mais sur...ordinateur portable, avec sa solution Garmin Mobile PC.
On connaissait depuis quelques mois le logiciel de navigation Garmin Mobile XT, déployé pour commencer sur les PDAPhones Eten Glofiish annoncés en fin d'année. Le fabricant américain de systèmes GPS Garmin s'attaque dorénavant aussi au marché du GPS sur ordinateur portable avec une nouvelle solution qui sera présentée à l'occasion du salon CES 2008 de Las Vegas : l'ensemble Garmin Mobile PC.

Il transforme tout ordinateur portable en véritable système de navigation GPS, avec une interface identique à celle retrouvée sur ses PND ( Personal Navigation Device ), ainsi que les mêmes fonctionnalités comme l'affichage de la météo ou les quelques 6 millions de points d'intérêt couvrant restaurants, hôtels, stations-services...


Fonctionnalités identiques à celles d'un PND
Garmin Mobile PC sera disponible en deux configurations, soit avec le logiciel de navigation seul soit en association avec le récepteur GPS Garmin 20x à connecter en USB. La solution logicielle est bien sûr compatible avec tout système GPS standard.

L'application permet de calculer des itinéraires, d'obtenir des instructions vocales virage par virage ou de recalculer un nouveau trajet à la volée, exactement comme les PND du marché mais avec l'avantage du grand affichage d'un ordinateur portable.

D'autre part, le logiciel de navigation permet d'accdéder au portail Garmin Online Services offrant un certain nombre d'informations supplémentaires, comme par exemple la liste des radars automatiques pour l'Europe.

Garmin Mobile PC sera commercialisé à partir du deuxième trimestre 2008 pour un prix de 99 dollars avec le récepteur GPS Garmin 20x ou 59 dollars pour le logiciel de navigation seul. "

Si c'est le cas il sera sûrement très populaire au Québec !

Alain, sorry, I myself don't speak French (and English is not my mother tongue either ), but I used Google Translate web page to translate the above. My guess (and hope) would be that the upcoming Garmin Mobile PC will indeed be multilingual. Last week I contacted Garmin about a review copy of the program, but they were in the middle of CES 2008, and told me they would get back to me when CES was over.

Sorry I was thinking you could read French little bit… Next time I write in French I will add a summary in English. It was a article written in a French European magazine on the same software.

http://www.generation-nt.com/garmin-mobile-pc-gps-ordinateurs-actualite-65964.html

You are right, I hope that this new software will offer the French language…

Tanks

This should make for a nice competition between MS and Garmin, especially if they offer it in french too. Prices are about the same.

Do you understand that is the turn direction is in English or only the street names ???


"easy-to-use navigation software, turn-by-turn directions that speak street names (English only), route planning and more"


https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=13484


A.

Marvin,

FreeTranslation.com is generally superior to Google's translate page. Here's their translation. As you can see, it's still not perfect but certainly not difficult to understand. Sometimes Google's translations make less sense to me than the original French, which I read only very slowly and painfully. My grade 11 French class was so very long ago.

It would make sense that the turn directions would be in the selected language. Garmin already has all the necessary language files compiled for their multilingual products for everything except the street names. For instance, I can get many different language files for my iQue 3600. The directions are all in the selected language, but the iQue does not do street names.

Putting the directions into different languages is relatively easy because it only requires the necessary directional words to be spoken in that language and recorded. It does not require any form of speech synthesis.

Converting the text of the street names to spoken words is a very complex process of trying to convert text into some sort of phonemes that can be joined together to create something that sounds like the spoken word. As far as I know, nobody has done the necessary work for anything except English.

Donc en français vous entendrez des instructions directionnelles françaises suivies par la prononciation anglaise drôle du nom de rue.

...ken...

I hope you are wright...:

Tournez à droite sur St-John Street !

It is not bad !

A.

It is important to know that many of the synthesized street names sound very odd in any language, so we English do not have an unfair advantage. The French (or any non-english) street names should sound very ... "interesting" ... when spoken with an english computer accent. Probably nobody will understand them, in any language.

...ken...

Question ?

"The software only version of Garmin Mobile PC is expected to be available for a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $59.99."

At that price the maps for US and Canada are includes ?

ie.: "includes the same detailed maps, points of interest and coverage areas as the traditional City Navigator map data"

Or only the software ? And we will have to buy the maps separately ??

I asked Garmin about the same thing, and yes, it will include USA/Canada map data. I cannot find the email now, it must be on my home PC, but that's what I recall. I'm just not clear on if it is going to be possible for users outside of USA/Canada to use Garmin map products for other parts of the world in conjunction with the new Garmin Mobile PC. I'll try to find out.

I'm willing to bet that the software is based on "nroute". It would not make sense to reinvent it. All it needs is for the display to be made prettier, like Streets & Trips.

(EDIT: I just read the announcement again and they have added the same user interface as the Nuvi. So we can probably expect the same features and functions to be available.)

When I installed nroute on my laptop, I already had two Garmin map products installed on the laptop (City Navigator North America, Metroguide Canada). When I ran nroute the first time, it immediately found both map sets and allowed me to choose the one I wanted to use. There is a drop-down list on the left of the menu bar that appears if you have more than one map product installed and you just click the one to display.

I have seven items in the dropdown list on my desktop. I did nothing special to make them available to nroute.

That seems to be the approach Garmin takes. They do not tie their map products to any particular navigation product. That means that once you have their laptop software you should be able to use any of their map products with it. I cannot think of anything in the laptop software that would make it specific to North America .... except for the interface language of the menus.

For the user interface, it is normal for Garmin to make two versions of their software. One is English. The other is EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish). In addition to the EFIGS version, I can also get Finnish and Norwegian voice guidance for my iQue 3600.

Once those interfaces and voice guidance packages have been established, it's not difficult to make them available for multiple products. So even if all the languages are not fully supported when the product is first available, I would expect them all to be available very soon after.

I have no personal connection with Garmin, so I have no special knowledge of any of this.

...ken...