Easy Showily – Ultralight GPS
Earlier this year I looked into Ultralight GPS Units. I ended up trying out the Garmin Forerunner 405, but wasn’t thrilled with it. I liked the watch form-factor, but it was clunky to use and was missing an Altimeter. It also came with a weird USB-cable which made field-charging it somewhat difficult.
In the end, I decided a basic GPS logger is all I needed. A GPS logger will record waypoints - show basic lat|long information on a screen and they usually run on easily field-replaceable batteries. It doesn’t come with a fancy color screen and map data like the traditional GPS units.
The “Easy Showily”, as awkward as the name might be – came up trumps. This is a deceptively excellent device.
First and foremost – the device is incredibly small and light - weighing in at 1.3 oz without batteries.
Secondly – it has amazing battery life. I used AAA Energizer Lithium Batteries and got over 20 hours of logging-time per pair. A pair weighs in at 0.3 oz.
Digging a little deeper – the cap comes off and reveals a USB plug. The device is elegantly simple – in that it does not require drivers or special software to operate. The USB connection exposes a typical thumb-drive (albeit with a meagre 5Mb of storage), and as the GPS unit logs data, it simply writes the way points to a file on the drive.
When you insert the device into a PC, windows detects it as a Thumb Drive and auto-runs the Win_Tool.exe application installed on the thumb drive. This application proceeds to unpack the data file into many different formats – a GPX file – the most common GPS exchange file format, and a collection of HTML and Javascript files that it then proceed to open a browser on – which uses Google Maps to display your way-points. I get all the benefits of Google Maps terrain data without needing to install special mapping software on my machine.
A side-bar allows you to show each GPS ‘track’ (a collection of way points), and overlay other information – such as ‘push-pin’ data, direction, speed etc.
Ideal for multi-day trips, the Easily Showily can store almost 100,000 way points. When logging aggressively – as a way-point every 10 seconds – that’s over 23days of continuous data assuming 12 hrs of hiking a day!
It’s chocked full of other features like power-saving shake-activated mode, photo-location-tagging software, multiple recording modes (bike, walk, run, car etc) and more.
Costs about $99 from ‘Buy GPS Now’.
And the point of carrying a GPS? So I can easily crank out maps like this one of our Pasayten Trip.
12 Responses to “Easy Showily – Ultralight GPS”
November 10th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
[...] all gone over to the Camping Blogger web site to enroll in his GPS give-away. However, the blog Brett on Stuff has a review of a different GPS unit. It’s not so much with the flashy, but he’s very happy with the amount of data and [...]
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Have you played with the photo tagging portion of this? I’m interested in the logging feature but I really want to know if it can add gps coordinates to my photos.
Thanks!
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Josh - not enough to give you a good answer. I played with it a little, and it seemed to do the right thing, but I’m not 100% sure. If it get the chance this weekend, i’ll give it a whirl and let you know.
February 22nd, 2009 at 7:00 am
I have just bought this from ebay and mainly for Geo-tagging photos and it si brilliant, very pleased.
can leave it in camera bag (in a side pocket) or in my shirt pocket and works perfectly.
LOVE it! (had it for 2 days )
Also takes 2 rechargable AAA, which is NOT obvious from any other source!
March 25th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Does this unit report only lat long coordinates or can it also report in UTM?
March 25th, 2009 at 9:51 am
lat-long only that i can find.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Can the unit display and track distance while you are carrying it? I would love to have a way to know what distance I covered over a given amount of time.
April 5th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Shawn - no, the LCD interface is really limited. The beauty of this device is as a simple tracker vs. a full functional GPS unit.
April 27th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Found another gps logger with an LCD screen for about $65 by Holux. I plan to do some testing and will try to report on it in a few weeks. I will take it out for a 3 night trip in May. Just FYI.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
[...] Brett has a nice review here. [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Hey all. I just posted the other day about the Holux M-241 Over here: http://oodaboo.com/42913/ . It’s pretty darn cool. I like the fact that you can have it log by time or distance. Meaning you can actually tell it every time I move XX number of feet/meters from my last position log it. It will also tell you your Altitude and Distance as the crow flies or total route distance. Very slick little device.
Brett, I was searching for others who have been trying this route as well. Good write up on the Wintec device. It does two things I wish the Holux would do. It mounts as external media which makes it descent for Mac users. I also like the fact that it runs on AAAs like the rest of my equipment does.
Cheers
Matthew
May 7th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
the holux looks very cool - thanks for the pointer.