For a long time I was thinking about purchasing a portable GPS device and I also wanted to replace my old GSM. One of the most popular devices is TomTom Go, but I felt it would be better to integrate both into a smartphone. TomTom also has a product called TomTom Mobile 5 that allows GPS navigation on your smartphone.

Therefore I bought the Qtek 8310 and TomTom Mobile 5 at PDAshop.be, I picked up the Navigation pack. The installation was easy, the only thing I had to do was to upgrade the TomTom software to TomTom Mobile 5.2 which can be found here, so that the software supports the Qtek 8310 which is the same as the i-mate sp5 (this must be chosen in the product upgrade). The TomTom package includes a mini-SD card which contains the TomTom software and maps that can be inserted into the smartphone.

I have to admit that everything works perfectly, the software is identically to the TomTom Go devices, there are no speed issues and the screen resolution is more than sufficient. Until now I didn’t encounter any problems.

The smartphone itself has many many features, one of them is:

• OS: Microsoft Windows Mobile
  
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS / EDGE module
  
• GPRS functionality
  
• 1.3 Mega Pixels CMOS
  
• Mini-USB plug (Slave USB, Power In)
  
• Infrared IrDA SIR
  
• miniSD Card slot
  
• Bluetooth
  
• WiFi
  
• ActiveSync
  
• MSN Messenger, IE, etc.
  
• …

And most importantly you can write .NET applications for your smartphone. If you download the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK for Smartphone you get extra templates inside Visual Studio 2005 for writing smartphone applications.

Update:

• Using the i-mate SP5 with Visual Studio 2005
  
• Alert – Security permission was insufficient to update your device