IFA Wrap-up: Berlin

An example of how not to use your GPS device.

Ever since the first caveman learned to store his food supply (imitating the squirrel perhaps), it seems we've been obsessed with hiding and then trying to find, the "stash". So much so, that according to geocaching.com, there are approximately 900,000 caches around the world.
And the connection to IFA? Garmin of course. The Kansas based company is sponsoring Treasure Hunt 2.0, the Garmin GPS Festival auf Zollverein. Several thousand GPS fans, gamers and geocaching nuts will be descending on the former coal mine (heritage listed Zollverein in Germany) for the event. If you're one of them and looking for a weekend with a difference, there's still some time to book a flight: the festival runs over the weekend of the 19 and 20 September.
And as far as Garmin is concerned, what better device to use than its newly released Dakota touchscreen outdoor handhelds? The Dakota 10 and 20 GPS navigators pack a high sensitivity GPS receiver, worldwide basemap and colour touchscreen display into a compact, waterproof device.

The Garmin Dakota 20

Up to 20 hours of battery give you plenty of time to lose yourself, find yourself, and of course, stash those caches - you can download up to 2000 caches with information such as location, terrain, difficulty, etc. No more print-outs to get soggy and lost.
Features on the Dakota 20 include a three-axis compass, barometric altimeter, a microSD card slot and wireless unit-to-unit connectivity. The Dakota devices can apparently even maintain satellite reception in heavy tree cover or deep canyons.
For city dwellers and weekend boaties, Dakota comes preloaded with a worldwide basemap, is compatible with City Navigator NT for turn-by-turn directions and Blue Chart g2 for marine charting.
If you're one of those GPS users tired of paying for each update (as let's face it, things change rapidly in this world of ours), Garmin is now offering nuMaps Lifetime, a single fee programme (US$119.99) that allows you to download the latest map and point of interest information every quarter for the lifetime of your device.
The disclaimer? "The subscription is not transferable if the unit is sold, is not transferable to another compatible unit and is valid as long as Garmin offers map updates for the particular PND model and map updates are available from Garmin's applicable map data supplier". Right... a lot of variables there that could rapidly terminate the 'lifetime'' and at the moment it looks like it is only available for Europe and North America.
With that, this correspondent needs to find her way home. Look out for full coverage of IFA in the next issue of PC World.

By Pauline Herbst