Bluetooth GPS on Tapwave (Or any other Palm 5 PDA): Never get lost again!

Hardware: I just purchased a bluetooth GPS reciever for my pda from Teletype, the Mini-Bluetooth GPS system you can find at http://www.teletype.com for $179. This is the cheapest bluetooth receiver you can get and it reaquires its location once every 1/10th of a second, where other older GPS take up to 5 seconds. Bluetooth GPS has only been out there for about a year now, so its pretty new to the market. But teletype has won awards from cnet and others so I went with them. You can get non-bluetooth GPS recievers that connect to your pda with a wire for as little as $60 but the Zodiac is not a standard palm so I didn't have that option.

Software: Mapopolis http://www.mapopolis.com It turns out there aren't as many GPS mapping software packages for Palm as PocketPC, but it turns out that Mapopolis is the one to use. The program is free, the maps cost money. About $10 a map, or $99 for a CD of all the maps in the united states, it is definitely the cheapest GPS software out there. I took it for a test drive yesterday and it works like a charm. Here are some tips

* If you want to use several coenciding maps together ie San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marine, click the "Load Contiguous Maps"
* You can load all the maps you want to your SD card, but when you are viewing them they must be transferred to your PDA's internal memory. Since I only have 32MB of internal and maps are 1.5MB to 6MB in size each, I can load the ones I need from the SD card to memory and then Mapopolis will ask if you want to delete them from memory when you exit the program
*Under the menu GPS->GPS Settings I would check "Keep device power on for 1hr" so that your PDA does not turn off in the middle of your road trip
*Navigating: You can navigate easily from your current GPS location to an Address by type in the address. Also to a place! You simply type the name of the resturaunt or gas station or whatever you are trying to get to and you are on your way. Be sure to check the "show landmarks" option to be able to use this feature. I typed in my bank WaMu and on the map it showed my location and ALL the WaMu locations in San Francisco. I then simply clicked on the location closest to me on the map, and directions were generated and I was on my way! Finally, you can enter in an address from your address book. So if you need to get to a friends house, just type in there name and off you go!