Category: Handheld

It’s hard to keep up with marine related iPhone apps, and the reviews at Apple’s iTunes Store often don’t help.  The Celestial Compass above, for instance, has seventy 1 or 2 star “this app doesn’t work/sucks” type reviews versus just fifteen positive ratings, even though it does exactly what it purports to do, and that’s not trivial.  Admittedly ‘compass’ may be a confusing name, but this app uses spherical trigonometry and an ephemeris to calculate the bearings (azimuths) of three celestial bodies at your location so you can line one of them up with the screen and thus orient yourself to True North, E, S, W, etc…

How cool is this!  Most of the time we were hiking Long Island over the last two days I had Navionics Mobile 2.2 (East Coast) running on the iPhone and in track mode.  Thus I could use it to check our progress against the trail map (downloadable here).  I also took some iPhone photos of the mossy rich and rugged scenery from within Mobile, which then geo positions them on the chart.  That’s all neat, but the true kicker is that I could easily email the whole track with (reduced) photos to anyone as a KMZ file (only 248k, downloadable here) that can be overlaid on Google Earth as shown above.  Or, with only two touch commands, could post it all on my Facebook page, where it seems to link to a Navionics-served Google Maps file which you may be able to see even if you don’t have Google Earth or don’t know beans about Facebook (like me).  This easy track and photo sharing is great, but in fact the iPhone has been useful in many ways on this cruise…

iPhone folks will notice that the one I’m holding above is upside down.  That’s because the Wind Meter app shown uses the sound of wind passing over the iPhone’s microphone to measure its speed.  And — would you believe it? — it actually works.  I was out testing and photographing the NMEA 2000 wind rig early this morning and thus could compare Wind Meter to a consensus of five high quality sensors mounted just a few feet over my head.  No, it’s not as accurate or responsive as they are (especially flaky under 3 knots or so), and it apparently can’t handle speeds over about 25 knots, but still…

So there’s a new iPhone, the 3G S, and some of its new features — like a built-in compass, voice commands/feedback, and a much faster processor — will no doubt benefit marine navigation applications.  But I’ve been trying the major existing apps (thanks to a loaner 3G from Navionics), and can tell you that they’re pretty seductive as is.  None is perfect by any means but the three above — Navionics’ Mobile Gold, GPSNavX’s iNavX, and Navimatics’ Charts & Tides — each has some interesting features.  And I’ve assembled a super duper screen shot slide show to illustrate…

Thanks to the April editon of Sailing World, I now know about the interesting and nearly free iPhone app MotionX-GPS. It’s more a GPS than a plotter, and not specific to boating, but, as you can see above, it’s got some boating fans. MotionX purportedly uses…

Lowrance just announced a new line of Endura touch-screen handheld GPS plotters that look like they’ll give Garmin some competition in this niche. Of particular interest, I think, is this line…