navigation

The Dale, Jr.-edition Spotter GPS has Junior gearing you up for the ride with "You drive, I'll ride shotgun." The portable device offers turn-by-turn directions and features Junior-isms like "Hang a right" and "Park it, we're here." The RightWay Spotter comes installed with 1.7 million points of interest, which includes a point-of-interest tour of Charlotte, North Carolina that can also lead you to some of Dale's favorite places. If that weren't enough, the GPS plays MP3s and videos, displays photos, and has an e-book reader, all for $299.

Anyone who uses a satnav regularly knows the feeling of looking at the directions being given - or actually trying to follow them - and wondering "WTF?" Try an experiment and plug one of your regular destinations into your satnav and see what it spit out; seven times out of ten you'll wonder "Why would it tell me to go that way?"

A driver in England has once again followed the instructions from his car's GPS system as if he were Abraham heeding instructions from The Almighty. Headed to a friend's house, the driver was told by his GPS to go up a steep walking path, and he did so. Luckily the path was lined by a fence, because when the driver crested a hill, he slid down the path and into the fence, which stopped him from going over a 100-foot cliff.

GM is out to win hearts and minds, one OnStar-equipped vehicle at a time. The General is talking to other carmakers about offering OnStar, which would be a return to previous practice. The service was linked with six other brands in the past, including Audi, Acura, and Lexus, but the ties were cut around the time cellular communications switched to digital from analog.

Navigon and Rand McNally have teamed up to develop some interesting new GPS features that make it easier for users to personalize their trips.

Landmark View 3D is s a $40 upgrade for Navigon's 2200T model and has the ability to display 600 North American landmark buildings in 3D to aid directions... or at least add some novelty to your nav. In keeping with the tourist theme, scenic routes and city guides will be available for $20 each. The scenic routes will feature weekend getaway suggestions, picturesque tours and regional trips. More than 1,400 cites are covered in the guides and routes can be customized to fit your interests. And for another $30 a year, Navigon owners can now be alerted to red light camera locations.

If you're buying an A8 this year, prepare to spend a lot of time getting to know your new MMI system. We have consistently thought that Audi's buttons-and-knob interface is the best, and it looks like they've put an entire NASA team on the job of making it better. A seven-inch TFT screen with 800x400 resolution is now controlled by an 8-position joystick. Moving from one screen to another is done via "elegant crossfades," which sounds a bit PowerPoint-ish, but we'll wait until we see it to judge. And among other improvements, navigational maps can be rendered in "birds-eye perspective" 3D, with topographical map coloration. The only thing missing is the Encyclopedia Britanica. You can check out the exhaustive press release after the jump.

As previously reported, Suzuki has decided to include navigation on its SX4 Sport and Crossover before you make the first mark on the options list. That will make the $15,999 car the lowest priced car in America to come standard with talking maps. And now they're set to arrive in the SX4 Special Editions that arrive in Suzuki showrooms this month.

BMW's MY 2009 cars will get a new iDrive system with a 40GB hard drive. According to Bimmerfile, the drive allotment will have 12GB dedicated to navigational maps (and 8GB for entertainment and 10GB for your address book, because you've got more friends than music, apparently). With nav maps placed on the hard drive, BMW will no longer be providing a case full of map DVDs.

The Internets are abuzz with the announcement of an all-new iPhone, and with features like 3G data connections, new applications and GPS navigation, we're excited too. If you've been making plans to produce your own navigation app for iPhone 2.0, however, you may not be all that thrilled. A closer look at the iPhone SDK agreement shows that creating software for "real-time route guidance" is forbidden. This may mean that the creative kids at Cupertino aren't going to let anyone compete with the the Google maps solution it's already settled on.