Re: Dumbing Down GPS, Lat/Long Getting Lost

As GPS is more consumerized, dumbing down is inevitable. It should be
in order to gain mass market acceptance.

Most of my family members could care less about lat/lon and never will.
But, they love what GPS does for them in terms of car nav and other
applications.

GPS for the consumer is like the engine in your car. It can't work
without it, but you don't care how it works.



John.Spr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Some background: A long time ago, I used to know a little about
celestial navigation. About ten years ago, I played with a GPS a
little. Then I got my wife a Garmin C-320 for Christmas.

I was astonished to find that it *can't* display its location as
numerical lat/long, and that you *can't* key in the lat/long of a
destination. Is this most fundamental, venerable, and useful of all
navigation standards going to disappear behind a dumbed down user
interface? What can we do to prevent it?

One thing might be to add lat/long to the addresses on business cards,
in advertising, etc. As the cost of GPS goes down, consumer use will
go up. We're at the very beginning of that revolution, about where the
internet was a decade ago. We need to make lat/long as
trendy/sexy/high-tech as a dot com address was back then. Use it to
prove to the world that you're on the cutting edge, leading the
revolution.

At this point, lat/long is the easiest and surest way to tell someone
how to find you on Google Earth. (I always look at new places there,
if only to find the best way to get into the parking lot.) If enough
people get used to using it, manufacturers will make it accessible on
their GPS devices.

Any other ideas, please?



-- J.S.

34° 12' 39.34" N 118° 32' 23.69" W

.

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