I’ve been sent one of these iGotU GT600 GPS Travel and Sports Logger gadgets to take a look at. It’s a GPS unit that records your position while you explore the world or jog the track. When you get home, download the GPS data and you can use it to map your route or to geotag your photos if you sync your camera clock with it.

While there are a million phones and apps out there that can do both of those things, anyone who’s left their GPS and mapping software running will know what it does to your phone’s battery life. The GT600 is a completely dedicated unit that’s designed to be as easy to use as possible and is completely forgettable while you’re out and about. The results are fantastic, read on to see why.

Specifications

The GT600 is powered by a SiRF Star III, low power GPS chipset and the 64MB of RAM allow it to record 262,000 waypoints. The battery is a (relatively) huge 750mAh battery and Mobile Action reckon it can keep running for 80 hours, recording a waypoint continuously every 15 seconds. Or if you use it for 6 hours a day the battery should last for 2 weeks or until the memory fills up.

Best of all, when you stop moving the thing switches off automatically, and then powers back up when you head off again. It’s light too, without it’s soft gel protective case it weighs a negligible 37g (3.25oz). It comes with trip recording software (@trip), sports logging software (SportsTracker) and a very basic “Where am I?” app, that will display your current location if the GT600 is plugged into your PC.

Setting Up

It’s a very nice looking product and there’s nothing on the logger except a button and a proprietary charging port. It comes with a proprietary USB cable, software, wrist strap and a protective gel case. There’s also a lanyard loop similar to the ones found on cell phones so you could conceivably wear the thing around your neck. The unit is weather resistant, hence the proprietary cable connection, but Mobile Action stress that it’s not waterproof.

There’s one button that turns the unit on and off, and if you give the button a quick press while it’s on it will log a waypoint which shows up in the software. Like all GPS units, it needs an unobstructed view of the sky so it needs to be somewhere high on your person or maybe in the top of your bag, facing upwards. Those seem to be the only instructions for use.

The unit has some internal smarts that can only be adjusted using the included @trip software. You can choose either manual control of the unit, or you can program it like a VCR to switch on or off and you can choose the duration as well as the date.

[Click screenshots to enlarge]

There is also a choice of six usage modes; walking, running, cycling, city driving (motor scooter), sailing and highway driving (car). You can set the recording interval separately for each usage mode, but there’s also a smart mode that’s velocity-sensitive. The upshot being if you go fast, the recording interval can be increased to improve the resolution. You can also turn off the motion detection and enable circular logging, which will just keep writing data to the memory, if it fills up, it returns to the beginning overwriting the oldest data first. You can export the data either as a .csv or .gpx file so you can use it with other software. There’s also the option to upload your trip to the net, via the @trip website. You can upload your route and any photos you took and where you took them so friends and family can enjoy the journey as well.

Geotagging

Apart from recording where you’ve been the other main feature of the GT600 is geotagging. Geotagging is the addition of GPS coordinates to the metadata of photos and while it’s undoubtedly a useful feature, if you don’t have a GPS unit with you when you take the photo, it’s a pain in the neck to tag them by hand later on. To geotag with the GT600 you just need to sync the date and clock in your camera with the clock inside the GT600, via the @trip software. Once that’s done you’re all set to go travelling.

After you’ve recorded your trip, you can import your photos into the @trip software and it will automatically tag them according to the time they were taken and display them on the map of your travels. The map is generated via Google Maps, but the data in the photos also works with Bing Maps and Yahoo! Maps. What’s more the data is written to the photo’s metadata and thus anything you open the photo with that can read the GPS data will display it for you (Facebook, Flickr, Picasa etc). This is very cool.

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In Use

I took the iGotU 600 out for several outings to try and use it three different ways.

The first and most accurate method was to have the GPS sitting on a car dashboard in full view of the sky. The unit worked very well however I had the recording interval at 8 seconds, which is a bit too coarse for highway driving, however the results were still very good. Here’s a shot showing the accuracy of the unit. I took the just as we were about enter a tunnel and before you ask, no I wasn’t driving.

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For my second outing, I attached the GPS to my toddler to test it’s sensitivity and reliability in a changing environment, with a waypoint recording interval of 15 seconds. The GT600 doesn’t log a waypoint if it doesn’t have a GPS fix, but because it just draws lines between the waypoints it has logged, you can get strange routes like this one where the line crosses the water, however the photo call out next to it is still very accurate. If you need very accurate results all the time, you’ll need to keep in a stable position and/or turn up the recording interval.

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Lastly I attached it to my camera strap and took a walk. I routinely checked the signal LEDs on the GT600, and it seemed to maintain a decent satellite fix, as indicated by the route below. The start and halfway point do contain some stray waypoints though but I was under heavy tree cover.

[Click to enlarge]

Likes

• Ridiculously easy to use
• Small, lightweight, relatively tough.
• GPS logger is quite sensitive and works in less than ideal conditions
• Software works fabulously and photo geotagging could not be simpler
• Doubles as a USB GPS dongle for PCs

Dislikes

• Needs a PC with the @trip software on it to extract data
• Unit cannot tell you your current location without a PC
• Software is Windows-only
• The long battery life of the device may cause you to forget about charging it or downloading the data (that’s a pretty small problem)

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a device to keep track of where you’ve been and where you’ve taken photos on long trips, then the iGotU 600 is perfect. It’s simple, has a huge battery life and it just works. If you’re a traveller, photographer or sports-person you’ll find a use for the GT600

In, fact I reckon the GT600 is a cheap alternative to dedicated SLR camera GPS taggers, which steal your flash hot shoe, drain your camera battery and cost over $200. You can pick up a GT600 (or one of it’s smaller cousins) from here for US$120, or from here for about �83.

Tags: gadget, usb, photography, igotu+gt600, gps+geotagger, gps, travel+logger, sports+logger, photo+tagger

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