Earthcomber

[Kwan]

Has anyone used this yet?
I have TomTom 5 and interested in trying it out.
Chris, what do you think, have you tried it on your treo with TomTom?

[chris]

Has anyone used this yet?
I have TomTom 5 and interested in trying it out.
Chris, what do you think, have you tried it on your treo with TomTom?

I haven't had a chance to yet. I spoke with Jim Brady just yesterday and he was explaining his vision -- along with providing me a better understanding of their product. I'm looking forward to checking it out. If it works with TomTom, that would be awesome. Nice enhancement to TT Navigator.

-Chris

[Kwan]

I've been playing around with it. Interesting program. I've yet to try it with tomtom, but if it doesnt integrate, I dont think I'd use it. Since TomTom has its own POI's.
Also, I think that you need to buy a spot guide. Without it I havent been able to find any restaurants.

[chris]

Last week, I went into Manhattan to go see Death Cab for Cutie. We went walked around the city for about 1 hour before settling on a restaurant. I normally don't carry my TomTom GPS, so the Moon Metro or Mobil guide would have been great. The CEO sounded pretty confident the GPS would work with the Treo.

[Kwan]

Thats were we're different. In Houston, we dont walk . We drive everywhere!
I'm originally from NYC, but I sure dont miss the mass transportation.

[Kwan]

I was able to succesfully use the TomTom GPS with this program. It was able to give my location. Seems like a nice program. But because there is no additional software for houston, the list of POI's is not exactly comprehensive.

[chris]

I was able to succesfully use the TomTom GPS with this program. It was able to give my location. Seems like a nice program. But because there is no additional software for houston, the list of POI's is not exactly comprehensive.

New York 1
Houston 0

Well, you are in the World Series though...

That's good news to hear about the TomTom. I'm sure they'll be expanding their Spot Guides to include major cities like Houston.

What types of POI's come with Earthcomber?

-Chris

[Kwan]

I havent converted to Houston, I'm still a NY fan when it comes to sports.
Good thing, cause the Astros got swept. Pathetic.
Anyway, the POI's are pretty much everything you could think of....restaurants, museums, ATM's. The list just wasnt comprehensive since I didnt have a spot guide.
One thing, when I'm using earthcomber, and I get a call, the orange color scheme of earthcomber takes over the caller ID screen.
I think I'll keep it around in case I need it someday.

[cdunworth]

Hi -- My name is Chris Dunworth, I'm one of the engineers at Earthcomber. I ran across your discussion here while crawling around the net looking to see how our new release was being received. I hope you don't mind my jumping in with a few comments....

Kwan, you wondered if Spot Guides were required, and the answer is definitely no. They are premium plugins from some of the best travel guide publishers around (Mobil, Moon, Damron), and we think people would be happy with the content in them -- reviews, recommendations, history....even dead celebrities (check out Find A Grave). But the basic service -- which includes the full mapping engine, access to all maps, access to community groups, plus the standard commercial location set -- is all free. And we're always trying to add more locations to this set (in our holding pen we have about 50,000 ATMs to be loaded very soon). Beefing up the restaurant listings is currently a high priority.

And Chris, we're definitely trying to expand the Spot Guide bookshelf. We'll add several titles over the next few months, including some from new publishers. We hope folks find something to their liking there.

We'd love to hear more impressions from your use of the software. Feel free to gripe to us if you have any problems (use the support link on our website, or the public forums in Earthcomber Community). Thanks for giving it a try.

Kind Regards,

Chris Dunworth
http://www.earthcomber.com/