I had to think for a moment if this belongs under technical or non-technical :confused1:

Here's my thought: We all, well, I do anyway, love to think that traveling with a GPS is 'essential'.

To answer this question correctly one must first define traveling. Traveling through the sahara, or Amsterdam, or India?

Well, not the Sahara, just from Oz to Amsterdam. For a long time I was 'convinced' I should really take one. Now:

MelbourneToLondon.com didn't bring one
The Ringdahl Family (Sweden to SE Asia) brought one but it's never been out the box, they just use a compass
LOS ZAPP (Argentina to Alaska and now Oz to India) definitely don't have one

AND I now have this lovely little app on my iphone called GPS MotionX, which takes a little longer to acquire sat positioning, as it's not 12 channel, but still does the job of giving you your coordinates, stores 300 waypoints and 100 tracks, it even has a compass!

Of course you can't download maps onto it (allthough you can cache openstreetmap tiles), but most of the countries we're traveling through don't exist for, say, a garmin gps anyway, although I don't know if the 'world map' that comes with a garmin would be any use whatsoever, considering we carry 1:1200.000 paper maps of all countries anyway.

So, is bringing, say a Garmin 60csx REALLY going to make the trip, um, shall we say 'better'?

Any thoughts appreciated!

Kai