Recommendations for business use

[Thomaso]

I am in the fortunate position of not having committed to a particular GPS device for my company's sales force. I would like that choice to be driven by the software I should use to add value to the GPS devices. So I now seek advice on those 2 decisions.

I want to be able to store my customers and prospects as POIs with as much information as possible about them displayed when the GPS device is nearby to them. So which software would best enable me to prepare and then download names, addresses (postcodes) and other information about my customers & prospects? Can the software change a Postcode to a grid reference or do I need to do this separately? If so is there a utility that can do that for me?

Do some devices display more information than others, such as in more text characters or in multiple data fields?

Is the choice of device dependent on the software used for preparing the POIs or would any device do, so long as it could accept a data card and do proximity alerts? Which device would you recommend based on the fact that this is a multiple unit purchase rather than a private purchase (which may not be so price conscious)? The intended use is UK only.

Any help with the above questions would be much appreciated. :D

[lbendlin]

Most probably you are better off looking at the problem from a different perspective.

The contacts with all their details should be maintained in the Contacts application, and then you should use a navigation program that supports "navigate to contacts" (most do) .

Navigation programs don't talk grid reference, they talk WGS84 latitude and longitude.

I am not aware of any PND that has a decent contacts application, so you are most likely looking at a Pocket PC/Smartphone based solution, possibly with some third party coding. A few of the Pocket PC navigation solutions allow SDK access to their navigation engine.
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[TurnerTech]

If you want to do it the way you describe, investigate the Garmin POI Loader. This allows you to create your own POI details so it should hold all the information that is currently displayed when you select a hotel. e.g. name address and phone number.

You can probably lay out the fields to hold data more relevant to you.

The newer Garmin devices claim to provide Postcode searching, so you should be able to store the records with the Postcode and it should navigate you to them. You should not need to do any conversion.

The newer Garmin handhelds hold much more data about places, more an offline Guidebook. If the POI Loader supports this complexity, you would be quids in.

Try looking at some of the links on www.Garmin.com. there is a wealth of information about GPS once you browse around a bit.

If you need to convert Postcodes to references, try Multimap or Streetmap.co.uk on the Web, or Microsoft Autoroute.

You can also use software like Anquetmaps, position the cursor and it gives you the Grid reference in Lat/Lon or OS National Grid.

Similarly with Googlemaps or even better GoogleEarth. Enter a Postcode and then zoom in until you can see the colour of the cars in the carpark.

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