Garmin Mobile XT GPS

Installing And Download Garmin Mobile XT MapSource

By Joe Young

Garmin Mobile XT GPS

Garmin Mobile XT is a fantastic product from Garmin! Garmin Mobile XT sells for around $200.00US which is really a low price for what you get. It comes to you shipped in a nicely packed blue box with several accessories. It comes with the instructional book plus a handy cigarette lighter charger for the motorcycle or the car! One thing you must purchase is a mini-B USB to USB cable as most of the time you need to charge it from your computer’s USB port.

For our purposes in this test, we will be installing Garmin Mobile XT on my Softbank X01HT, you must remember that you can install this software on any Windows Mobile device however only Windows Mobile 2003 and up. Also, the great thing about this product is, in the same package you have the Palm and laptop portions of the software as well. So if you have a Palm Pilot device with Bluetooth and it is sporting the new Palm OS 5.4 you can easily install this software, on the other hand if you have a Laptop with Bluetooth, again you can easily install this software and voila you have a beautiful GPS unit. Your device whatever it is MUST HAVE BLUETOOTH, the Willcom devices from Sharp do NOT have Bluetooth, now, I hear through the grapevine that they will indeed be coming out with some new devices in the next few months that will have Bluetooth, however the WZERO3 DOES NOT HAVE BLUETOOTH, so it is absolutely imperative that you check out this before you spend your money.

The Garmin Bluetooth GPS included in this device is indeed sporting the new SiRF Star III chipset and has an amazing and still unexplained 22hours+ battery life. It is strange, but it works and I have been playing with this unit for many months and I honestly can not live without it. The Japan Map v2 is honestly one of the greatest purchased that I have ever charged on my credit card. Especially since being new to Japan I get lost when I step three steps away from my house. This beautiful program can trace your route so if you ever get lost, you just follow the little blue line back home and you are home free. One more quick thing to mention, in Japan, since buildings are everywhere sometimes it will take a couple of minutes to get the initial satellite lock. Once you do get the satellite lock, then you can walk around, jump, play, do whatever you want, but it is that initial satellite lock that is sometimes difficult to attain. In Canada and USA I get a lock in like 20 seconds, with about 10 different satellites, in Japan I will get a lock of 4 satellites after about 2-3 minutes, depending upon where I am at the time.

You should now have in front of you the two CD’s of great software that we will need for this operation. You will need the Garmin Mobile XT software and the Japan Map. Also one more quick point to mention, when you purchase the Garmin Mobile XT software, it already comes with the North American Maps FREE! So you travellers out there should be pretty happy. They are really detailed and honestly the best GPS products I have ever seen.

Installing the product is easy, however it is a little confusing also. I will write it down in detail for all of you here. First, take your Garmin Mobile XT and pop it into the CDROM, it will come up with some choices that will seem a little confusing because with this product you can install it on either a Palm, Pocket PC, or Laptop. Choose the “Install Garmin Mobile XT”.

Next is an important part, you MUST have a 512MB (I have 1GB) storage card in your device at least, because part of the program gets installed to your storage card on your Palm or your Pocket PC device and part of it gets installed on to the device itself, if you do not have a flash card, the program will not install. Choose the storage card and click “Install”.

It takes quite a while for the program to install onto the storage card as it is a pretty big program for your device. Also when it is done it should prompt you on your PPC or Palm if you would like to install Garmin Mobile XT, choose “YES”. When Garmin Mobile XT is finished installing which could take up to 5 minutes on slower devices, you should see this message pop up! Click “Yes.” Then Garmin will load, it should display a little warning message, but just click yes. Then the setup screen appears which should ask you to select the voice language, just make the appropriate change and click “Next”. Select your units, then click “Next”, and then select weather or not you would like to be prompted to see if Garmin can access the internet. I recommend that if you are on the flat rate plan such as I am then you can just change this item to “Always” so if it needs to access the internet to get current weather or traffic information, it can do so without hassling you while you are driving.

Next it will scan your Bluetooth, the Bluetooth device from Garmin also acts like a piracy protection dongle for this software, if you don’t have Garmin brand GPS device, you can not run Garmin Mobile GPS. Once it is connected Garmin will goto the main screen! Then you are almost half way through the installation process! Allright you can pat yourself on the back, your doing good!

One very important thing to know is that you must at all times keep 20MB free on your devices’ main memory, or Garmin Mobile XT will have trouble running!!! You can check this right now by minimizing the Garmin application by clicking on the X in the very top right hand corner, not the X that is under the X in the top right hand corner, the VERY VERY top right hand X.

Also, you must realize something for the new people out there. Your pocket PC phone’s programs are always running when you click on the X. The X button does NOT close the program like in windows, it simply minimizes the program. The program is still running, that is why in Garmin Mobile XT they have a second X button that actually does close down the program, for this exercise though we want to see how much free memory that you have, because you want to have as close to 20 megabytes free as possible! So after it is minimized, click on the “start” button, then go to “settings”, then click on the “system” tab, then click on the “memory” icon within the system tab. Ok, now it should tell you how much free program memory you have, You want to have as close to 20MB as possible, having less than 20MB can cause some serious slowdown and potential crashes when running Garmin. Now if you do not have enough free program memory, then click on Running programs, and see what is currently running in your device, only “Garmin Mobile XT” and maybe “Active sync” should be currently running on your device at this time! If there is anything else that is running then you should close that program, notice how when you close the program the free program memory goes up? This is good. Now, I can not solve all of your memory problems but one constantly faces them when running applications on a Pocket PC and Palm device, especially Palm devices, yikes!

Ok, back to Garmin mobile, click on Garmin Mobile XT in the “Running Programs List” and then click on “Activate”, you should now be back to the main screen again. You should also see on your main computer, a screen stating that it needs to communicate with your mobile device and your Garmin GPS. Click on “Next”!

It will then install the maps onto your computer. Here is something interesting for all of you who didn’t know, what actually happens with your device is that, since maps are so big, what you do is install the entire map onto your computer, then once all of the maps have been installed on your computer then you can pick and choose what portions to install on your mobile device. Here is another interesting point, I have a big Tran Flash card for my X01HT Softbank Hermes PPC Mobile phone (wow that was a long sentence) and so I just decided to install the whole map to my device however I soon realized that the less I install the faster my GPS device will run, if I install only the portion of the map that I need for the day or the week, instead of installing all of Japan, then it runs super quick because it has to draw less, makes sense! Most people are reading this saying “I already knew that” but, this is just for the people like me who didn’t know.

So, click “next” and install the maps onto your computer! Check off the “I accept the data agreement” and “I accept the software agreement” and click next. I would also highly recommend to install the program to the default directory of c:\Garmin because many Garmin programs look for the Garmin program in that directory, just lest confusion, creates less problems. Ok, this should take about a couple minutes to install. Next comes all the codes and Garmin online and a bunch of painfully complicated things, or so I think, but that is just me. All right, click on finish!

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