By Joe Procopio

Last year, when I took my family on our annual trek up to New York to visit family and friends, I took a stack of printouts from Google Maps almost 2 inches thick. This was my lifeline. The trip usually consists of a handful of cities over 10 days, including various hotels, homes of relatives, attractions for the kids, and usually some business being done along the way. It’s the ultimate multitask: reunion, vacation, and sales trip all rolled into one crazy long week.

So you can imagine me, on the side of some county highway between I95 and Grandma’s house, staring at a crumpled and sweat-drenched ink-jet printout, scratching my head and tossing out the occasional “Not right now! LET DADDY THINK!”

This year, on the same trip, I didn’t even bother with Google. I finally got on board the navigation train, thanks to a ridiculously cool Magellan Maestro 5310. The funny thing is, I’m not late to the party. Navigation has heretofore been a tool for the road warrior, not unlike one of those poles for your car so that you can hang your shirts across the backseat (which SCREAMS “cool,” by the way). Nav has also been a first-adopter toy for those of us who just wanted our own personal Cortana. Or Kitt.

But nav is now. Over the last year or so, GPS Navigation Devices have trended towards ubiquitous for the every day driver. You’ve got your tunes, mobile, wallet, and keys, you’ve got your nav. You can leave the house.

I won’t play tough guy with you, it was a little scary the first time I climbed into the driver’s seat with nothing but a slick looking little box with its calming, almost motherly voice guiding my fate. I’ve used nav before – but that was mostly airport to hotel or finding a decent restaurant in a major metropolitan area. Even then, the dreaded “screen of vast nothingness,” the lack of my own existence (according to my device), popped up occasionally, forcing me to rely on my own sense of direction (none) for a little while until the device figured out I was still here and hadn’t slid into some parallel universe.

The Maestro had no such philosophical misgivings. It knew where I was at all times. And every address I punched in, from downtown Manhattan to Providence, RI, to Lake George to Fairfax, VA was not only in the system but also accurate and timely with the directions.

The features are slick. This was my first time with a 3D perspective, and I realized the importance of this when I found myself glancing, rather than staring, at the device to get my next turn. 3D is more natural and, thanks to a generous 5-inch screen, the graphics were sharp and clear, including legible street names and decent split screens for impending actions – where the left side shows your next turn in 2D while the right side maintains the map in 3D with your route in green.

The text-to-speech feature ups the ante even further. The truth is, I rarely had to look at the screen at all, as the device pretty much told me what kind of turn, when to take it, and where I would be (i.e. “In 2 miles, make a right turn onto Main street”). There were only rare quirks, like referring to “North” in “N. Main St.” as the letter “N” and sometimes spelling “S-T” instead of recognizing that as “street.”

But, you know, I figured it out.

Now, the most important aspect of the device, or for that matter navigation in general, is the capacity, depth, and accuracy of the database. This is not only crucial to get you where you are going, which is the primary function of nav, but also to allow the device to transcend from electronic map to personal travel assistant.

This is my point. Sure, a navigation system is a great thing to have. It’s essential to the frequent traveler the same why that suitcases with wheels are essential to the frequent traveler. But to the ordinary traveler, someone like me who usually does a trip a month, well, I can carry my suitcase, I don’t really need a new one. And if it’s expensive and if I then have to keep track of cables and adapters and whatnot, then it probably goes to my back burner in terms of geek gadget acquisition.

But road warriors and gadget nerds aren’t the ones the gadget makers are aiming for. Steve Jobs doesn’t just want you to have an iPhone, he wants your grandmother to have an iPhone. And the secondary function of the nav system, which is steadily becoming its primary function, has launched nav into mainstream, and it first hit home for me with the Maestro on the big trip.

I dig a good game of single deck blackjack, and I tried to get away at night on this trip to visit as many casinos as I could. Sue me, it’s a vice. I had been to Foxwoods up in Connecticut before, so I made a return trip one night to see if they had the game yet. They did not. However, it occurred to me that I had the Maestro, so I went back to the car, punched in Mohegan Sun, and within an hour was able to discover they also did not have the game.

Whether or not I lost a bunch of money on an eight-deck shoe is beside the point. The fact is I was no longer tied to my itinerary, what I knew, or whether or not I knew how to get there. I wasn’t using nav to make it easier to get where I needed to go, I was using nav to seek out and enjoy new places.

When I got back from the trip, this new function manifested itself in more useful ways than I can count.

For example: “Where do you want to eat?”

This is no longer a dry reading through the list of seven or eight places the wife and I usually haunt. And I swear this is the geekiest thing ever, but sitting on the couch with the Maestro and punching in restaurant types and having it do the work for me is awesome. You can do this on the web, of course, but the Maestro also does a magnificent job of getting you there and remembering where you’ve been, so we’re slowly expanding our leisure universe, as well as shopping universe, as well as errand universe (which is my least favorite universe).

What really makes this more than cool, and again, I laud the Maestro 5310’s 6-million points of interest for making this possible, is my new ability to always know where I’m going. When people ask me to meet them somewhere, usually a business lunch, and it’s somewhere I’ve never been, I don’t have to figure out if I know where it is or not. I can just say “see you there.” Admittedly, it can’t know where everywhere is, only God and Google can do that, but for my day-to-day, it’s running at 100%.

That’s the point. The Maestro is now a part of my day-to-day. I’ve named it.

And that’s what the gadget makers are looking for. Used to be a phone with a qwerty keyboard was for nerds and Japanese schoolgirls. Today, if your phone doesn’t have a keyboard, it’s quaint, because without it, you can’t do Facebook. But with its adoption into the mainstream, a social phenomenon like Twittering can take off.

This is not new. You can go all the way back to the PC (and further, but in my world, history begins with the TRS-80). We data crunchers were crunching data on our beige boxes and 256-color monitors way back before you could whip out your Asus in Starbucks and check how many Weight Watchers points that latte was about to cost you. The Internet browser, that secondary function of the PC and one that was considered an enemy of corporate productivity as late as the early oughts, is what put a laptop in every dorm room as well as most kitchens and/or breakfast nooks.

And it’s this, the ability to expand one’s horizon in useful and enriching ways, that Magellan has captured with this device. Now, there are some glitches. It’s a little too much for the pocket, so if you don’t have GPS or Google Maps on your phone, you’ll need some sort of purse and/or backpack for the unit. Also, the battery life is not great, and these two faults together sort of knock the 5310 out of the walkaround ballpark. This is definitely a car unit, and as a car unit, it’s outstanding. It’s big enough to be visible and safe to use, feature packed enough to remove all the hassles, and smart enough to be reliable.

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Joe Procopio is the founder of Intrepid Media, a technical and management consulting and services firm (intrepidmedia.net) and a publishing company/creative network (intrepidmedia.com). He is currently writing Gleaning the Cube, a collection of humorous techie columns that includes exclusive new material. He is currently on another long trip, one involving business, pleasure, single-deck blackjack, and light industrial espionage. He can be reached at joe@intrepidmedia.net.

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