We are getting ready to head out on a road trip tomorrow. A little over three weeks, mostly in Florida. I am very excited about it. I got some new gadgets. One thing was an ipad. The real reason I wanted it was to use it for approach plates and charts for aviation. Add a GPS, and you get some real capability. The GPS I got was the Dual XGPS-150. It is WAAS enabled so it is very accurate. I am going to use that combination on our road trip to see what can be done. I downloaded a couple applications which are offline road navigation doohickies. One was MapsWithMe. It is a piece of crap. I paid $5 for the full blown version and got software that hardly works. I wanted it to map POI along the way. It couldn't even find the McDonalds half a mile from my house. So I got another one called Copilot GPS which included POI search in its free version. So far this seems to do the job and it also does route plannning which the other one didn't. I checked out the route it found to our first hotel in Pensacola and it was the same as our trusty Garmin.

As for the ipad, I am not impressed. It is hard to figure out how to use and it is always wanting to use personal information and contacts information. I think I am going to neuter it as best as I can and just use it for navigation. The apps that are available for websites I use are pretty poor. All in all, I think that it would be a good deal for people who have no life and need some electronic baby sitter or for those who would rather use electronics in place of drugs to escape reality. Apple is way overhyped. My HP mini is much better. It does everything I want without compromise. It is a lot cheaper.