Category: Handheld

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…

SailClever is a new kid in the sailboat racing tactical software niche, and it looks clever indeed…

I’ve been meaning to post this photo, bigger here, for a while, as indicated by the snow in the background! It shows how the Garmin Colorado 400c screen—despite the somewhat anemic back-lighting I once bitched about—looks quite good in direct sunlight. I was also going…