Useful Gadget of the Week : i-GotU GPS Travel / Photo Recorder

We just got our hands on one of these little guys after looking around for a way to tag our DSLR photos with GPS location data. The match-boxed sized unit (currently on special offer at £29.99) takes a snapshot of your GPS info (longitude, latitude, altitude, speed, heading, date and time) at regular intervals set by you.  If you’re a photographer or just want to record a car journey, a walk, hike or a bike ride etc with digital breadcrumbs then read on.

Connect the GPS to your computer via USB to set the recording interval.  You can also take a manual read (say when you take a photo) by pressing the button on the front.  The i-GotU is clever enough to know the speed it’s going too and you can choose an option to increase the frequency of samples over a certain speed (useful when using in a car).  Grabbing your position every 10 seconds will give you a battery life of around 20 hours, whilst dropping that back to every 30 seconds will give you a massive 60 hours.  Helpfully the supplied charger lead allows you to juice up from any USB socket and you’ll have full power again in around 2 hours.

The supplied software is Windows only but we found this free Open Source app for Mac OSX and Linux that allows you to download your trip data from the iGot-U.  The .GXP files it produces are easily be converted to .KML files for use in Google Earth (check out the free HoudahGPS convertor too on the Mac App Store) and once there your journey can be viewed including your speed.  You could even slip one of these into a car (with view of the sky and drivers consent of course) to track where they’ve been, and what speeds they’ve been driving at!  Best of all they are currently on special offer for just £29.99.  Another great free Mac app (GPSPhotoLinker) will painlessly merge your GPS data into your photos EXIF fields – which is the job we bought the i-GotU for.  The supplied Windows software also includes Sports Analyser with fitness analysis if you are using the unit for training.

“With the supplied i-gotU software, you can now keep a record of your own journey by simply pressing the log button when you take a photo. By ensuring your digital camera and tracker clocks are synchronised, you can easily upload a travel blog of your journey to www.a-trip.com and associated pictures to online album sites such as Yahoo Flickr™ and Google Picasa™ to quickly share photos with your friends and family online. A travel blog not only helps to visualise your journey on 2D/3D Google Maps™, but also allows you to view the landscape from various angles using Google Earth™ 360 degree panorama technology. The software enables you to create an HTML file with embedded YouTube video links for your friends to see the route of your trip on software such as Google Maps™ along with pictures you have taken on the way! Alternatively, the GPS travel tracker could even be used to retrospectively track a route of your pet or vehicle, providing detailed information on its whereabouts, velocity, date and time over a given period, without you having been there! The tracker can be set to log your GPS location at preset or user defined intervals and using digitised street mapping on Google Maps™ or Google Earth™, the i-gotU software can accurately report travel activities such as where a vehicle or a pet went to, when it was there and how long it stayed there. In addition to the supplied travel blog software, the product comes with two bonus software titles – Where I Am and Sports Analyser.

Where I Am – By connecting the unit to your laptop or netbook as a GPS receiver, you can locate yourself quickly on Google, Yahoo! or Bing Maps and guide yourself onwards. A handy tool for the photographer, backpacker, casual traveller to check POIs around them on the go! The GPS travel tracker can also be used with compatible third party software (not supplied) such as Microsoft Streets and Maps or other navigation software.

Sports Analyser – Allows you to track and analyse sports exercise on Google Maps and monitor work-out results with calorie readings, useful charts and statistics analysis. Meet your fitness goals by tracking workout progress with calendar review.

• Small in size, big on memory with great battery performance
• Record and trace your journey with photo locations using GPS technology
• View your journey on Google Maps™ and Google Earth™
• Retrospectively view a route and locations of your child, vehicle or pet with detailed information on travel, speed, date and time
• Pocket-sized water resistant GPS travel tracker – great for blogging your journey!
• Upload a travel blog of your journey and associated pictures to software such as Yahoo Flickr™ and Google Picasa™
• Broadcast your travel experience via social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc.
• Pre-set GPS logging intervals of 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 seconds or manually set from 1 second to 60 minutes
• Geotrack and analyse sports or exercise activities with sport charts and calorie consumption reference
• Supplied with USB charging cable, rubber material belt or strap mounting case and software on CD-Rom
• Compatible with Windows® 2000, Windows® XP, 32-bit versions of Windows® Vista and Windows 7
• Uses a SiRF Star III GPS chipset powered by a 230mAh Lithium-ion battery
• Measures just 44.5(h) x 28.5(w) x 13(d) mm
• Weighs only 20g “

Available now from Maplin.com

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