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A Palm fast enough to do GPS navigation

When Garmin says it is doing a GPS-capable hand-held, people tend to assume it will work properly - so the arrival of the iQue 3600, finally, is a moment of truth. Can the Palm platform run fast enough? Verdict seems to be yes ...

The iQue 3600 was announced back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, and everybody got excited - quite a lot of them because they didn't believe you could really do Global Positioning properly on a Palm-based hand-held.

Garmin-made add-ons exist for other pocket computers, and the ones that work with Palms have been criticised for slowness. The processor couldn't draw the map fast enough.

A hasty review of the 3600 - a brief one, by Forbes writer Arik Hesseldahl, says yes, this one can.

The good news is: it's shipping at last. Garmin has been taking pre-orders through Amazon, at $40 off - since April!

The bad news is: it will only tell you where you are, and how to get where you are going, if you live in the US, or in a few European cities.

Garmin does have some maps for Europe but they appear to be restricted to "major metro areas" - which is nice, but falls a bit short of the major Autoroute maps that it is offering for its US customers. And anyway, it's not selling the thing outside America yet.

The full text of the press release says: "The iQue 3600 is the first PDA to feature a built-in GPS antenna and integrated turn-by-turn navigation software. Using an ARM processor powered by Palm OS(R) 5, the iQue 3600 combines Garmin's proprietary Que technology with the unit's Address Book and Date Book. The integrated result is that users can look up an address or appointment on their iQue 3600 and navigate to it using the mapping function, following turn-by-turn, voice-guided directions to their destination."

Price - well, if you expect it to be cheap, you're not living on the same planet, so the maps won't work for you! - it's $600, plus a handful of change; and if you want to clip it to your car, it's another $80 for the holder.

Full details on Garmin's own web site.