A spokesperson for the Air Force Space Command has made it a point to explain that an aging GPS satellite was most certainly not the problem in the case of the lost couple. While no fingers were pointed, it was added that the AFSC "operates the GPS satellites that emit the signal that consumer GPS devices use, they do not create or update the maps that run on the devices, and they are not involved in calculating the routes between destinations."

Gee. Is that a hint about whom to blame when lost with a gadget? Aside from our own missing sense of direction, that is. [Space]

The 450 has a 3-inch, 240 x 400 pixel screen, 850MB of internal memory and a MicroSD slot. It works off AAs but with lithium or NiMH cells you can get 16 hours of life. There's a $400 450 model (lacking the t, which is $500) that misses the full payload of North American topographical maps, covering "major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas".

I'm all about cheap, internet enabled smartphone GPS apps for walking and turn by turn, but for the serious outdoorsman who doesn't want to risk ruining or running down batteries in their phone, and wants a full payload of maps for when the internet goes down over the north side of that big mountain, this $500 outdoor GPS seems like the one to have. But man, think about how much smartphone and GPS app $500 buys you these days. You'd have to be really, really serious about the outdoors these days to get a device like this. I'm personally on the fence.

[Business Wire, Garmin Blog, Garmin]

Garmin® Grows in Outdoor Recreation, Adding New Oregon® Handhelds, Garmin Connect™ Compatibility and Free Custom Maps Utility

OLATHE, Kan.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), the global leader in satellite navigation, today announced the Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 touchscreen GPS devices, the newest of Garmin's next-generation outdoor handhelds now compatible with the online community at Garmin Connect as well as Garmin's free Custom Maps utility for transferring paper or digital maps onto your compatible handheld.

"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them"

"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them," said Dan Bartel, Garmin's vice president of worldwide sales. "Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 provide a bridge between the slimmed-down Dakota™ family and the top-of-line Oregon 550t, all of which work seamlessly with Garmin Custom Maps in planning your adventure and Garmin Connect for reliving the experience and sharing the memories."

Responsive to the touch of a finger, yet resistant to the rigors of nature, Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 simplify navigation through a glove-friendly touchscreen interface. This bright 3" color display is easier than ever to read and use in all conditions. Other key upgrades include user-selectable dashboards, enhanced track navigation, high-speed USB for faster map transfers with your computer, photo navigation and the 3-axis tilt-compensated electronic compass, which shows your heading even when you're standing still, without the need to hold it level. The new dashboards give users the ability to customize the appearance of various pages on your Oregon, including the geocaching, compass, stopwatch and elevation functions. For hikers, cyclists and trail runners, the enhanced track navigation will prove especially useful. When navigating to a destination on an active track, users will see the changes in elevation ahead of them as well as where they've been. Also, waypoints and other key locations along the active route – such as start, end and high and low elevation points – now appear on the map and active route pages. The new Oregon units also include a barometric altimeter, paperless geocaching and wireless exchange of tracks, waypoints, routes and geocaches with compatible Oregon, Dakota, Colorado® and Foretrex® devices.

Both units boast a worldwide shaded relief basemap, and Oregon 450t adds preloaded 100K topographic maps for the entire United States and state-of-the-art 3D elevation perspective. Coverage on the 450t includes major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas. In addition, you can search for points of interest by name or proximity to your location and view descriptive details for terrain contours, topo elevations, summits and geographical points.

Customizing maps for your Garmin outdoor handheld – and downloading your activity afterward - were never easier. Through a few simple steps, Garmin's Custom Maps can bring the details, labels and landmarks of your existing paper or electronic map to a compatible Garmin Oregon, Dakota or Colorado. Compatible with both PC and Mac, this free utility complements the myriad of mapping products already offered for Garmin devices, including City Navigator®, NT for turn-by-turn directions on city streets, Blue Chart® g2, for marine charting, and TOPO U.S. 24K and 100K map software for incredible terrain detail (each sold separately). The power of Custom Maps is exemplified through paper and digital maps labeled for specific events and purposes, such as a college graduation invitation that lists campus buildings; a roadmap of a parade, marathon, 5K or bike race; a park pamphlet showing trailheads; land-management maps of wildlife and game areas; or a historic illustration of an area as it once stood. To walk through the steps, to find and share maps and to join discussions about Garmin Custom Maps, visit www.garmin.com/CustomMaps.

Experiences will live on long after the activity has ended, thanks to Garmin Connect's newly announced compatibility with Garmin outdoor handhelds, adding an expansive new product line to the free-to-join online community of more than 17 million activities – with more than 38,000 new activities per day – for sharing, storing, analyzing and enjoying. Outdoor and fitness enthusiasts alike can share activities on Facebook and Twitter, export to Google Earth or relive the activity in table view, calendar view or on a variety of maps including our new embedded Google Earth view.

The couple got trapped in the snow for three days in the Winema-Fremont National Forest after their SUV's navigator told them to follow Forest Service Road 28—35 miles down the remote road, they got stuck in a foot-and-a-half of snow. They would've frozen to death, except they had packed a bunch of winter clothes.

On the third day, the "atmospheric conditions" changed enough that their cellphone's GPS was able to put out a tiny signal that led 911 dispatchers to the couple's location.

And that's why you should still learn to navigate using the stars. [Yahoo]

As a quick primer, ANT+ is a wireless standard used by cyclists to measure and analyze their ride performance using a variety of wireless devices. It's been around for a while, but until Pedal Brain, there was no way to sync it up to an iPhone of iPod touch. Now there is!

Once you plug the Pedal Brain Synapse hardware device into your phone or touch, you'll start to get updates in real-time via the app on screen. When you're all done pedaling for the day, you can sync up with Pedal Brain on the Internet for a more in-depth analysis. There's team support too, which could make the software a boon for coaches.

The device/app will be available this spring, possibly in March, for $130 to $190. Unfortunately, the steep price does not include the additional charge for a subscription. A limited free version will be available at launch, but will crap out on you after a few weeks. [Pedal Brain via TechCrunch]

Granted, this should be seen as a trial, because it only includes a month of full services, after which a navigation subscription costs $3 a month or $25 a year via in-app purchases, though the months don't have to be consecutive, so you can sort of just pay as you go, buying nav access only when you need it. If you're driving anywhere over the holidays, seriously, just give it a shot. Four quarters, folks!

It's got a built-in GPS receiver, so it can work with your iPod Touch, as well as a charging port (obviously), Bluetooth for hands-free calling, audio-out for car stereo support, a built-in speaker and a noise-canceling speakerphone. And it's designed to dock with your phone even if you've got a case on it.

The price is a bit steep at $130, especially if you're just using this to charge and hold your iPhone, but if you're going to use your iPod Touch as a GPS device, this provides the "GPS" part of the deal. [Magellan]

Man, if dropping Canada cuts the price of an app in half, that says a lot about how much money we waste on international maps. They should offer this option to all of the countries they serve. However, there are plenty of cheaper versions out there, not to mention free Google Navigation. [iTunes via MacRumors via MobileCrunch]

The simple, but clever anti-theft idea comes from Australian-based Who-Rae, and recently won Popular Mechanic's Editor's Choice award at the SEMA car show. No word yet on pricing or availability, but if you've ever been the victim of a smash and grab, it could be one to keep an eye out for. [Maplock and Popular Mechanics via CNET]

There are convincing arguments to be made for law enforcement agencies' access to location data, like in missing person cases, kidnappings or maybe fugitive situations. It just seems like it ought to be a little more mediated than this:

[At the Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering conference] Sprint Nextel's electronic surveillance manager Paul Taylor described an automated system that law enforcement could use to easily look up subscriber whereabouts.

They can submit a request for a particular user's location up to every three minutes, for a period of 60 days, which accounts for the 8 million figure. What else does Sprint collect about you, for sharing?

Sprint keeps 24 months worth of URL history for some devices and that's not even because of law enforcement. "It's because marketing wants to rifle through the data," [Taylor] said.

The marketing data retention sounds like the kind of thing you might unknowingly sign off on in some kind of unintelligible user agreement, and the location stuff could conceivably be used only in palatable ways (if you broadly consider warranted wiretapping palatable) but they're both reminders that your telco—no, this isn't just Sprint's issue—knows a lot about you. Or, more to the point, that the average cellphone user has no idea how much data their wireless provider is collecting (or can collect) from them, and specifically, how it's used.

Queasy yet? No worries! There's a pharmacy two blocks to the west, and one block to the south. And they have your favorite pills. [PCWorld]

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed an alloy antenna that can be bent a la pretzel before resuming its native shape. The feat is accomplished through the micro liquid metal chambers that form as the building blocks of the antenna, allowing the device to so receive RF like metal, but maintain flexibility, like liquid.

Of course, as with any promising technology, the military is slated to get it first. And after hundreds of thousands of our service men and women develop strange, liquid-metal-related tumors, the public will get to buy an ever so safer 2.0 version. [Gadget Lab]

Joining other comical characters such as Homer Simpson and, err, Kim Cattrall, Snoop's VoiceSkin is available to download now for anyone who's confident they can last more than five minutes receiving directions like "Turn around when possible and keep it 'G', ya d-i-g?" [VoiceSkins via NME]

Image Credit: DodgeChallenger1

We're not sure when the sale ends—maybe ALK hasn't decided—but if you have at least a marginal interest in GPS apps for your iPhone or Android, it might be time to plunk down some cash for it. $20 ain't free, and CoPilot's looks sometimes verge on gaudy, but it's a competent, frequently updated app, and now a steal compared to even the cheapest subscription GPS app. [Android Version; iPhone Version; iTunes Link]

Update: This offer is extended until 9am Eastern Time on Tuesday, December 1st.

Skiing and snowboarding have always been cutting-edge sports, thanks to renegade personalities and high-tech gear. But this ski season, designers are stepping it up to a whole new level. Here, take a look at some of the finest in snowsports tech-and enter to win some gear of your own.

Want to score your own high-tech snowsports equipment? It's easy: Visit our sister site Skiingmag.com (we share owners, and a love of playing in the snow with the latest gadgets). Every day for the next week, they're giving away free gear, lift tickets and resort packages. All you have to do is answer a trivia question and enter to win.

Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what's new and what's next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.

Unlike traditional GPS, RTK-GPS doesn't measure the delay between its signal and the the signal received by a satellite—instead it measures the shorter wavelengths in the satellite's carrier signal. This can mean accuracies within one centimeter, but there are difficulties with aligning signals with RTK, and the need for multiple receivers makes the technology impractical for navigation. This is why the technology is most widely used in land surveying. If you would like to tinker around with one yourself, full instructions are available on the project page. [Project Page via Make]

Designed by Lucia Lorio, this fashion line is dubbed "Find Me If You Can." But how could you not find someone when they're running around with a pager-sized GPS device sewn into a bodice? While the fact that it would be impossible to not notice the gadget makes me laugh off the whole paranoia of jealous men using this as a sneaky way to keep tabs on their lovers, I still think it's a ridiculous design. Why you would spend between $1200 and $1600 for something intended to be ripped off a body. [The Age via GizmoWatch]

The module relays this information to your GPS unit via Bluetooth where you will be able to view a set of customizable gauges that provide details on things like fuel economy, RPMs, throttle position, intake manifold pressure, coolant temperature, intake air temperature, and emissions.

Awesome? Yeah, sure. Will it save Garmin from destruction at the hands of a possible Google navigation juggernaut? No, probably not. [Cnet via NaviGadget via Ubergizmo via DVICE]

Google Maps Navigation
• Google Navigator for Android Review: Good For Free But Far From Perfect
• Google Maps Navigation: A Free, Ass-Kicking, Turn-by-Turn Mobile App

(An)Droid:
• Motorola Droid First Hands On: It's a Terminator
• A Visual Guide to Android 2.0: So Much Nicer
• No Android Version of HTC HD2 After All?
• GSM Motorola Droid Caught on Video
• How Motorola Stopped Sucking
• Droid Eris Doesn't Look Too Shabby for a Cheapo Android Phone
• HTC Droid Eris Might Be the Cheapest Android Phone at $99
• HTC Hero Among First To Get Android 2.0 Update

Reviews:
• $1000 1080p Projector Battlemodo: Optoma HD20 vs Vivitek H1080FD
• BlackBerry Storm 2 Review: Improving, But Still Mostly Cloudy
• Corsair Flash Voyager 128GB USB Drive: As Big and Fast As a Small Fish
• Canon S90 Review: It'll Never Leave My Pocket (Except When I'm Taking Pictures)
• Samsung Moment Review: The ED-209 of Android Phones

The Copy/Paste Twins Saga
• I Want to Have Twins Just to Get Them These Awesome T-Shirts
• Twin Apple Fangirls Pwn Twin PC Clones
• The Origin of the Twin Copy-Paste T-Shirts

The Rest:
• 12 Things You Need To Know About Apple TV 3.0
• High Res Video of Ares I-X Launch
• http://gizmodo.com/5393755/an-astronaut-explains-how-well-fall-in-love-with-space-again
• Apple Tablet Will Restore Comic Books To Former Glory
• Build The Spirit Radio That Creeped Out Tesla Himself
• Behold, the BlackBerry* Watch: $150, Coming in February

The Game Changer

Brian already went through the details when he broke the news, all the features you need to know about. On paper, this baby sounds like it has everything the $100 apps have, and it's free (for Android 2.0 users). I won't go over all of the features again—live traffic, over-the-air maps, multiple visual layers, search along routes, etc.—so I encourage you to read that. This is what it feels to use the thing day to day, the wheels-on-the-ground perspective, and though it's certainly as powerful as billed, the experience itself is a little more sobering.

On Android 2.0, on the Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid I've been testing, Google navigation is part of the Car Home suite, an easy-to-read, easy-to-reach set of apps including map, turn-by-turn navigation, voice search, text search and contacts. However, as you can probably guess from reading that lineup, the lines are so blurry it can get confusing fast. The sane place to start is voice search.

Voices In, Voices Out

The surprise hit of Google's new software is the voice command. I said "Navigate to Cloud City" and it quickly launched the navigator, showing me a few options with "Cloud City" in the name. On top was my wife's favorite coffee shop (home of my favorite BBQ pulled-pork sandwich). I tapped it and got on my way. I have done this with street addresses, store names and categories like simply "barbecue" and it's worked fine. It's only when I tried text searching that things got iffy.

But voice command isn't the only voice feature that's awesome on this. The turn-by-turn lady may be a tad robotronic, but that's because she tells you everything, including street names and numbers. Text-to-speech is considered a bit of a premium among the iPhone apps (many have it or are getting it, but not all do), so to find it for free is impressive.

Searching Highs, Searching Lows

As I mentioned, the text search is not as smooth as the voice-activated stuff. That's because there are several different places to search, and at times they overlap in ways that make my head feel light. There's the basic directions view that iPhone users are used to seeing, where you type a destination with no predictive guessing on the app's part. Once you finish typing, it picks the most likely destination or offers you some options. Then there's the true "Search" window that gives you a keyboard and lets you type whatever you like, and tries to anticipate what it is you're typing by showing you similar past searches. And then there's a screen of all your past searches, that you can only get to by backing out of the main Search window. It's strange, and took me a while to figure out how to return to this little Narnia of a helpful screen.

If that's not chaotic enough, well, take away any browsable POI menus, any "go home" preset address feature, and any multi-stop trip planning tool. Scared yet? At least its only a few taps to your contacts—which you can fill up with all your favorite destinations—but only if you remember what those taps are.

Street View Blues

One of the things I was super excited about when Brian came back from his secret Google meeting was the Street View feature: When you came to a tricky intersection, Google would show you the actual intersection, and you would know just where to turn. Well, I live in Seattle, one of the biggest cities and certainly one of the most high-tech, and though I've driven with this thing on a few outings this week, I haven't once been shown a photo of an intersection. (Note: Brian says you have to tap the screen to see the picture as you approach an intersection, to which I reply, "Sounds suicidal, I'll pass.")

I do, however, see the photos pop up when I reach my destination, and without exception they've looked awful. Sure, you can flick them around once you've stopped, but I think this highlights the major trouble with Street View on a mobile platform.

Steady As She Goes

The driving directions are, for the most part, just fine. Re-routing is fast when you make an unscheduled turn, and the Droid phone appears to track the road as well or better than an iPhone. I have heard others talk of reliability issues, but frankly, that kind of evaluation takes weeks or months, and results can differ from location to location. Nobody outside of Google knows exactly what the reliability weak points are, especially since Google is using (from what I can tell) its own map data.

When you've navigated, you can pull up layers—traffic view, which shows you where the trouble's going to be; satellite view, which looks neat but I don't know how practical it is; and POI layers, like where the nearest gas or parking is. There's some customization you can do to this, but only in the 2D bird's-eye view.

The power comes when you select the Route Info screen (shown above), by popping up a menu while in your navigation screen. There you can see an icon with a solid arrow and a broken arrow, indicating alternate routes. Tap that icon, and you'll see your route plus two ghostly alternatives. By selecting one of the alternatives up top, you can re-route. The Route Info screen also contains the all-important turn-by-turn list, buried a bit more than I'd like, but clear and readable nonetheless.

Tooling around northeast Seattle has been fine. My gripes about the driving interface are mostly cosmetic: You can see the time till arrival, in hours and minutes, but you don't see a time of arrival, which I prefer. On other navigators and apps I've gotten used to seeing my speed in MPH and even posted speed limits, and Google doesn't show those either.

But at least the screen is clean and easy to read. If the screen stayed like this, I'd live.

Someday We'll Meet Again?

I spent a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the Google navigation app, but that's mostly because I get the feeling we'll all be experiencing it one way or another soon enough, be it on this exceptional Motorola Droid, other Android handsets or even on the iPhone. It's an extremely powerful program, but the execution isn't the best. Not by a stretch.

Still, if this was built in to the iPhone's Google Maps, or offered as a free download at the App Store, damn would it steal customers like a mofo. You might still see the occasional sale of a Navigon or a CoPilot, because of particular necessary features and because of the onboard map databases (which people who go off-grid prefer), but really, this thing would—and probably will—swallow the GPS app market alive.

Because of that, I am hoping Google's developers pay close attention to this review, too. The app is still in beta, but there's a lot of user-interface work yet to be done. Google: If you're going to knock everyone else off the mountain, at least give us an app worthy of a king.

Amazing voice recognition engine

Live traffic and alternate route planner

Text-to-speech

Good routing and fast re-routing

Satellite view and other views not always useful

Text search features are overlapping, confusing

Interface overall needs better flow

No POI category browsing or "go home" feature

No multi-stop trip planner

Esquire is one of the three magazines at the top of the journalistic totem pole—you write a feature for it, and a book deal falls in your lap with an old-timey leatherbound thud. Hallowed as the brand is, its leadership is having a deuce of a time getting digital. There was last year's humiliating venture into E-Ink-based advertorial. And then there's the December 2009 issue.

It will feature, among other actors, Robert Downey Jr. squatting awkwardly and gesturing towards his manhood, a human frame for what looks like a very basic 2D bar code. Yep, it's augmented reality, like they've done with Star Trek and Best Buy. Hold it the image up to a webcam, and, according to the WSJ, you "trigger the video segments, which are similar to some video-conferencing technologies in their lifelike quality." Wow, a video segment as lifelike as video conferencing, springing forth from Downey's balls. So we end up with just one question: Who's the most shameless, Esquire's editors, its advertising department or Downey? [WSJ]

Oh TomTom, your comeback has come too late. While the record should show that TomTom's iPhone app certainly made up for many shortcomings of its portable navigators, the delayed iPhone dock with built-in redundant GPS isn't going to take things to the next level. Since it was announced, GPS apps have dropped to prices so low they are actually free in certain cases. There are enough decent cheap options—and then some—in the App Store to guarantee you won't be paying $100 for TomTom's app. Since the dock sells for an additional $120—with no bundle pricing in sight—TomTom's iPhone navigation experience is suddenly more expensive than any TomTom navigator currently selling to people who aren't idiots. Engadget's dock review highlighted these issues, pointing out that its only real benefit is bestowing GPS reception on 1st-gen iPhones and iPod Touches—even though TomTom doesn't support them with a compatible app. No matter what happens, this product seems doomed. [Engadget]

Sometime in early 2010, Amtrak will be giving highspeed wireless internet access to people who ride its highspeed Acela trains. Some remark that at the outset this will be "free," but I say nonsense: Just because you're not paying for it one way doesn't mean you're not paying for it another. I have fond memories of the year I spent riding the rails from NYC to DC and back again, but that's just because I've blocked out the overpriced tickets, the insulting frequent-rider program, the long lines for the snack bar, and the fact that, if the trains ran at all, they would be remarkably late. So you see the Wi-Fi won't be free, no matter how little money changes hands. [Wi-Fi Net News]

While the rest of the world is talking about how great a tablet would be for books, videos, comics and all other varieties of leisure, the French are building a tablet for cooking. Actually, if they built a tablet for cooking, we'd cover it. QOOQ (get it?) is just some gimped Linux box that happens to be programmed to receive and display food-related videos, recipes and articles and, apparently, not a lot else. Call me know when it's oleophobic, sink-rinse-able, knife-friendly and can grind pepper rough or fine. [Electronista]