Trimble Outdoors GPS Navigation for Nextel Users
On the heels of announcements about Garmin Mobile and TeleNav GPS comes another announcement in the Cellphone GPS Navigation front. Interestingly, it is another company that is providing services for Nextel customers. Trimble Outdoors is the player this time with a service that is geared towards recreational GPS uses. While they mention “trip planning software” this probably isn’t the software you want if you are looking for turn by turn driving directions.
Instead the software caters to recreation by providing topographical maps, street maps, and aerial photography maps suitable for geocaching, hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, canoeing and other paddling sports, cross-country skiing, etc.
The rate plans start at $4.99 and go up to $9.99 a month similar to other services, however what is different is those rate plans are not entirely determined by feature-set, instead the different plans cover different amounts of data transfer… You essentially pay by how much data you think you will download.
To me this isn’t an attractive way to sell the plans because a new user will never know how much data transfer they will need. Even if you know you might use the service twice per month you still won’t know how big those maps will be to estimate the best service level for you. Still, it is one of the few services catering to the outdoor enthusiast rather than city drivers.
Once again I’ve found their demo does not work from various web browsers as they have built it so you can view their demo from here.
