The Syncing Apple An Exploration of Technology and Devices

Seidio Car Mount for Treo650

I really enjoyed my T|C while I had it. The most useful application I had was certainly TomTom Navigator 2004, which I used all the time in my car. I had been debating on getting a GPS device, but the options are so limited on them, and the ram is always an issue. It made sense to use my Palm as the device. It took some digging to get an adapter that works on the T|C, but TomTom produces a nice kit which I purchased (from Mobile Planet: "Palm Tungsten C GPS Kit"). The software was great, but there were two issues with the hardware.

• One- they had no specific car holder for the T|C, so my kit came with the Universal Holder, which as its name implies, will hold virtually any PDA.
  
  However, the problem is that it clamps down from the sides to squeeze a PDA of any width, and as you may know, the power button on the T|C is on the side, so every time you clamped it into the holder it would either turn on or off.

• Two- the nasty Palm V connector. The type V connector totally sucks.
  
  The little tiny hooks that keep the connector in the Palm are so tiny that you are certain of problems eventually. Sure enough, after about a month of use the connector stopped grabbing on one side. I was going to have to get a replacement, but I've since sold the T|C and now I use the Treo 650.

I'm glad to say that TomTom Navigator works fine on the Treo 650... but running the application is just the easy part. I have to accomplish two more things:

• Get either a BT or serial connection from the GPS receiver to the T650
• Get a holder for the car

I already have the universal holder, and i can use that but its big, bulky and very ugly. Besides it provides no integrated power or serial connection for the Treo: I'll have to have a tangle of wires to keep the Treo powered and get the GPS signal into it.

BT seems the perfect solution... I should mention that I actually have two TomTom kits, one with the serial GPS that I got for the T|C, and then a second one that I purchased for my wife and her Ipaq PocketPC. The second one is the Bluetooth GPS receiver. She rarely uses hers, so I have the choice between serial and BT GPS receivers.

However, the Treo650 doesn't seem to have a serial profile which would enable me to bond it to the BT GPS. I'm still investigating this.

The point of this post, and the solution to all these problems is the just-about-to-be-released Seidio G2500 Car Kit for Treo 650 which looks amazing. Not only is this a perfect fit for the T650, the 2500 model includes so many features that its hard to list them all. There is a port for my serial GPS, amplified speaker for hands-free talking (as well as a microphone), power from the cigarette lighter or directly wire it to your cars power, volume control on the speaker. All this for $129. I'm getting this as soon as its available, which should be any day now.