I’ll start off by saying I love POIFriend! 

I was contacted by POIfriend.com and I was rather intrigued. As you might suspect POIfriend.com (pronounced like boyfriend) is all about points of interests. Essentially, it is a social network that allows users to create and share their own POIs within their group of friends or with the entire community. With POIfriend, you can create your own POIs, download them to your GPS unit, iPhone or Blackberry, and share them with others site users and even with friends who aren’t members. Best of all, it’s free.

“The advantage POIfriend has is that you are in the driver’s seat — quite literally,” says Bill McLean, co-founder, POIfriend Inc. “We often don’t realize the sentimental value associated with the places important to us. Places are just places until they take on more of a personal, helpful, or intriguing aspect for us, so we’ve created an online community to share just that.”

“POIfriend.com is an essential tool for everyday life. It offers accessibility and sharing of your favorite shops, sporting events, restaurants, gas stations, bank machines — whatever it is that keeps your world ticking,” adds McLean.”

Since POIfriend.com is constantly updated by you, the user, the information is always current and fresh. Uploading your own POIs means that there’s no limit to the groups that you can create or the friends that you can involve. POIfriend allows you to share and grow your world, on the go, all the time. However, as exciting as this is, I feel there may be some inaccurate data. Either way, it is a great service and it is absolutely free. Here are a few more features:

– A one-stop shop for a broad-range of POI destinations
– Avoiding the hassles of store-locator navigation
– 100% FREE
– Connect with everyone you know and those you don’t
– User-friendly compatibility (works with most portable GPS-enabled
devices)
– No GPS required
– Stripping away the techno-babble from GPS and POI data
– No bio necessary – just an email will get you started
– Users have full control over the places they wish to share
– Compelling connection between businesses and your community

So what are you waiting for? Go sign up today!

TomTom seem to have accepted that the US market is a little different to the European one and this is their first product aimed squarely at the American market.

The TomTom GO 720 is a widescreen GPS navigation system with a SiRF star III chipset and text to speech capabilities. The unit comes with North American maps, MapShare, a program to allow users to make minor alterations on their units, submit those changes, and if elected receive changes from other users who use MapShare. The TomTom GO 720 allows you to make your own recordings for the verbal navigation commands and features a “Help Me!” button, giving users access to information about police, service stations and hospitals.

This is a solid, good quality piece of equipment. A little expensive perhaps, but comes complete with hierarchic state maps for the US market. The hardware is tried and tested, but some the software still has issues, particularly TomTom’s attempt at traffic information retrieval. In fact they are shipping the unit without TMC in the UK because of this very problem.

According to TomTom: “We indeed do not ship the GO 720T in the UK at this time. It is hoped that in the future we will be able to, when we have RDS/TMC hardware that functions in that specific region, and lives up to our quality expectations. We do not have a timeline for this, and therefore cannot say when this will happen. We are sorry to be so vague about this, but at this moment it’s still uncertain whether we will ever ship a GO 720T in the UK.”

And you thought traffic was bad in L.A.

WidgetBucks – Trend Watch – WidgetBucks.com

Check out this and other similar items at amazon.com:

• TomTom One, 3rd Edition 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Vehicle Navigator
• TomTom ONE XL 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator
• Garmin nüvi 350 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
• Garmin nüvi 360 3.5-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator

The Mio Digiwalker C520 is a big step up for Mio. Bluetooth hands-free, Text to Speech, built-in music and video player and a wide screen are impressive features for a unit at this price. Mio continues to offer great value in the GPS world, delivering a well-designed unit that only has a few minor issues. This is a solid piece of equipment that will navigate well for most people. It has more options to control its features, which may be intimidating for some, but a welcome capability for tech nerds. For my money, the Mio C520 is the best value out there with a feature set that others can only match for $100+ more.

The most useful feature of the Mio in my opinion, is the Text to Speech feature. It worked very well and, although I don’t speak them, as far as I could tell, the 15 languages other than English worked well also. It’s just a little too tempting to switch to Korean just for fun.

All in all, it’s a nice little unit, particularly at his price. The only niggle I could find was trying to use the hands-free mobile phone feature whilst driving meant messing around a little too much with the software for safety, but overall I would definitely recommend this at the price. In any case, you’ll be too busy watching Spiderman 4 to worry about that.

Right before the announcement of the iPhone, I gave myself a choice of getting AT&T’s BlackJack or the Blackberry Pearl. I chose the Blackberry Pearl, only because it was smaller and lighter. The BlackJack is a cool device. There is great news for you BlackJack lovers out there – the second edition is coming soon, dubbed the BlackJack II.The BlackJack II has some impressive features:Features & Benefits

• Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 standard – stay connected with calendar, email, to-do list and more
• Tri-band HSDPA/quad-band world phone – work from virtually anywhere at 3G speeds
• Large 2.4″ 65K TFT display screen – enjoy easier reading with the large display
• Integrated GPS – find your next destination quickly with TeleNav Maps or TeleNav GPS Navigator^TM
• Microsoft Office Mobile® – access Word®, Excel®, or view PowerPoint® files
• 2.0 megapixel camera and video recorder – capture and share great moments
• Stereo Bluetooth® 2.0 connectivity – experience true hands-free communication
• Embedded Mobile Instant Messenger supporting Yahoo!®, AOL®, and Windows Live^TM
• AT&T Video & AT&T Music – stream music and video in real time
• Video Share Calling – talk on the phone and share live video instantly
• Embedded RSS Reader Client – customize news feeds direct to your device
• QWERTY keyboard with front jog wheel

Compared to the original, the keyboard and d-pad both look much better, Windows Mobile 6 comes installed, “faster 3G speeds” are being promised, and GPS capability is integrated. There will also be the option of Black or Red when it ships.

Pioneer’s latest range of automobile based Sat-Nav systems went on show this week in Japan. Nine new models, headed by the top of the range AVIC-HRZ009G. Not available until the end of October, but with more features than a typical media PC.

Not content with offering one of the most sophisticated Sat-Nav systems ever, this baby has a digital terrestrial TV tuner, a 7 inch screen, DVD, DivX, MP3 WMA and AAC capabilities, along with a 40GB hard drive capable of ripping CDs to MP3s and a multi function remote control system. But will it make the coffee too?

With a price tag of around $2400, I would certainly hope so. To be the perfect in-car entertainment system, all it really needs is a built-in espresso maker. Pioneer haven’t yet released an English description of the beast, but their Japanese release information is here.

It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want this many toys at their fingertips whilst driving down the road, but this model seems designed to sit up front on the dashboard rather than take a back seat. Having said that, I want one so bad I can almost smell it. It seems unlikely this particular model will make the journey across to the US, but wouldn’t it look great on the dash of your Mustang?