Gizmodo: sucks

XRoad G-Map Is Offline Navigation For the iPhone

Jason Chen — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:59:00 EST

XRoad's G-Map is a 933MB app for your iPhone that gives you offline GPS for anything West of the Mississippi. Too bad its average review is two stars.

The app itself is $20, and can give you directions even without Wi-Fi. It's got standard GPS features like point of interest, location searching and 3D view, but according to the reviews, it sucks and the developers should be ashamed of themselves.

Some of the more major complaints are the lack of voice navigation, no instructions, limited POI, constant crashes, and no 3D. Weird, since they actually show a 3D screenshot as one of the sample shots in the App page. This may be the first GPS app for the iPhone, but you should stay away. [App Store]

UMPCs Suck Hard

johnb — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:43:50 EDT

It's becoming clearer and clearer that the UMPC is just a baby tablet and, like the tablet, will soon end up smeared in blood in an ER rather than smeared with peanut butter on your coffee table.

The folks at the Inquirer headed out to Computex and tried out a few UMPCs and found that the battery life is sub-par, the interface is difficult if useless, and they're really expensive. These three things have been solved before (Nokia 770 anyone?) yet MS, Intel, and the rest of the gang just don't seem to understand the issues involved.

No compromise from me on this, friends. UMPC is dead on the evolutionary vine. – John Biggs

Origami UMPCs are a disaster [TheInquirer]

Windows Vista Beta 2 Sucks

johnb — Wed, 24 May 2006 13:46:40 EDT

Columnist Gary Krakow informs the world that Vista Beta 2 "was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered." While this bit of ungrammatical hyperbole is purely subjective, we're slowly getting the feeling that the big V is going to blow a donkey.

Writing for MSNBC, Krakow informs us that the beta version is difficult to handle and that all the prettiness is lost on those with even a passing awareness of OS X. Granted, this was a Beta version, he was trying to drop it onto a laptop, and he got an early, early build, but excuses are excuses. Why drop a Beta release if it's not even decent?

It took me days to install a working version on a new Lenovo ThinkPad X60 laptop with 2GB of memory and all sorts of built-in wireless networking. I tried installing it as an update to the laptop's Windows XP — but after four hours of churning away the laptop shut down and wouldn't reboot.

We'll give it a try next week, probably, and let you know what's up. Otherwise, we're not holding our breath.

Windows Vista Beta 2: The key word is 'Beta' [MSNBC]