Pharos announces Trips & Pics: GPS, battery, and geocaching software

Nothing new here for seasoned geocachers, but Pharos is offering an easy little bundle for the outdoorsy types with long term memory problems in the form of Trips & Pics. It's essentially just the iGPS-500, a minuscule battery pack, and some geocaching software, all of which will be sold together for $90 when it hits retailers in January.

[Stan @ Jan 3rd 2008 1:27PM]

Do you mean geotagging software? Geocaching software doesn't seem to make much sense here.

[Bob @ Jan 3rd 2008 8:07PM]

Let me start this comment by saying that I work at Pharos and my comment is to answer the good question raised by Stan. The GPS unit and battery that is provided with Trips & Pics is designed for Geocaching. The Battery can provide over 24 hours of continuous use and the GPS unit itself has a cache that stores 12,000 fixes. The sample rate is adjustable from one reading per second, to one reading every 5 minutes. At one reading every 10 seconds you can record 1.6 days of continuous data if connected to a power source, or charging while in use. At one reading every 5 minutes the unit can store 45 days of information, again using a power source. We at Pharos are very excited by this product and we are looking forward to seeing the ways people have fun using Trips & Pics.

[Bo Pierce @ Feb 13th 2008 2:42PM]

Hi Bob - saw your comments about Geotagging coming in the next release. I have a unit - and it is great! However, not including Geotagging the EXIF frame right off the bat is quite a mistake - I think - because without that, it is essentially a toy to play with Google Earth instead of a serious option for photographers. However, the SirfIII chip is Great! and the package otherwise well designed. Another problem I encountered - the Software claims to save the log as a GPX file - however, I cannot get the GPX file to work with any software (3 so far) that uses GPX files to geotag photos. Perhaps that needs a "look at" for that next release also.

[Bo Pierce @ Feb 13th 2008 2:42PM]

Hi Bob - saw your comments about Geotagging coming in the next release. I have a unit - and it is great! However, not including Geotagging the EXIF frame right off the bat is quite a mistake - I think - because without that, it is essentially a toy to play with Google Earth instead of a serious option for photographers. However, the SirfIII chip is Great! and the package otherwise well designed. Another problem I encountered - the Software claims to save the log as a GPX file - however, I cannot get the GPX file to work with any software (3 so far) that uses GPX files to geotag photos. Perhaps that needs a "look at" for that next release also.

[Dylan @ Jan 4th 2008 2:38PM]

Geocaching is a "sport" where items are hidden in caches and then found by seekers. To be used in geocaching, the device would have to give you the ability to plug a destination into the unit and then track on that unit. From what I can tell, the device only records, and doesn't give you "trackback" or "goto" options necessary for finding geocaches. Bob, I'd like to hear more about the feature set in the software for photography applications. Does the bundled software edit the photo files exif header to insert any data? If so, what data (lat/long, POI data, etc.)? Will it work with raw files (such as Canon's CRW/CR2 files) for data injection? Thanks.

[Bob @ Jan 15th 2008 6:22PM]

Dylan,
Sorry this comment took so long I have been at CES all last week and it was very busy to say the least. Thanks for straighting me out on Geocaching. I thought it was walking, riding or biking in a city and using the track to spell out a message on an ariel view. You are correct you can not plug in a destination, it is strictly for tracking in a batch mode. For photography we will be adding the ability to add the location information to the EXIF header in the next release. As far as supporting RAW, that would be hard because of the differences by brand but we are considering supporting the Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) format. If you have the time please call me at Pharos, see our web site for contact information, I would like to get you views on the product and possible uses we have not considered.

[ALINEFX @ Jan 17th 2008 1:53PM]

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