Flutterby™! : OpenTom 2007-11-15 17:03:54.231476+00

OpenTom

2007-11-15 17:03:54.231476+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Caught a ride down to Apple today with Marty, who had a TomTom portable navigation system. Nice bright color touch screen, looks like a decent processor, GPS. Might make an interesting platform. The OpenTom project has all sorts of code to develop Linux apps on the platform.

A friend has one of these for her "corporate weasel" work and we talked about it as we wandered around Chicago. What she'd like to see, since her unit does Bluetooth, is the ability (via an "extra info" menu choice) to pull info from her Blackberry, primarily notes about specific locations, and have them either show up on the screen or be read to her as she gets close to her target, so she goes into a location with her mind refreshed about that location.

What I'd like to see is "smarter" units which learn my habits, what kind of places I visit, how long I stay, when I go there, etc. As I travel, the unit can make "intelligent" recommendations, ranking the choices by my past behavior. Ya know, bubble the porn shops up and the Starbucks down on my "points of interest" choices, as the visit trend develops. I would think that kind of analysis could be done off the unit itself and the "habits" profile updated regularly from a laptop or desktop or "black box."

I'm not sure how smart I want that little "black box" under my seat to get, but I can see some positives and negatives here.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-11-15 23:50:32.811664+00 by: jeff [edit history]

I'm still holding out for a little better integration of a media player and gps unit (we're already seeing that convergence). My little Sanyo Katana DLX cell phone is a decent media player and even offers broadband TV/radio along with limited-functionality turn-by-turn GPS.

I'd also like to see better integration of weather and traffic layers with the gps data. It's nice to see storm cell positions when you're out on a motorcycle!