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When looking for the best GPS to use for my boat I looked at a ton of options, but a few specific products stood out. 

The Garmin GPSMap 276C

This waterproof marine GPS system doubles as a land GPS for use in your car as well. There are many benefits of this product, but I’ll only cover a few in this article.

So what makes the Garmin GPSMap 276C such a good find?

Benefits
• You’ll have color chart plotting for both sea and land use.
• The 3.8-inch LCD is designed to allow easy reading in bright sunlight plus the large digits makes viewing easier.
• The unit comes with 3000 user waypoints and an expanded list of waypoint symbols. Plus built in info on interstates, cities, coastline detail and even US tide stations.
• If you are using it in your car, you’ll be given audible turn by turn instructions once you purchase the additional 12-volt speaker cable. If you don’t like the sound of the voice you have the option to ditch it.
• The reception on this device is quite good thanks to the adjustable quad helix antenna as well as the remote antenna.

You Should Know…..
• To make the most of your GPSMap, you can use data from MapSource CD-ROMs, Recreational Lakes, and City Select for street-level maps.

The Garmin GPSMap 276C retails for about $480 and considering the great features, that’s not a bad price.

The next waterproof marine GPS system on review is the Lowrance GlobalMap 7200C GPS Receiver.

This little beauty gives you a massive 7” viewing area. You’ll probably be able to see a tadpole in murky water with this baby.

To own one of these, you’ll need to part with around $700, but I think it is worth the cost.

What I Liked
• The device is totally waterproof, which is always useful. Even the memory card slots are waterproof.
• There is an internal memory backup for important GPS information.
• If you go off course or arrive at your destination the device will announce each event with an alarm.
• There are 37 zoom ranges between 0.05 to 4,000 miles.
• Internal back-up memory for key sonar settings/crucial GPS data.
• When used with the LowranceNet system this marine GPS chart plotter can act as a video, radar or weather display. How cool is that.
• This product comes with a warranty and depending on where you shop it could be one or two years.

Hopefully this will help you save time when looking for a great GPS system for your boat. 

We've all seen the macbook air, but is it worth the price tag

When an Apple release proclaimed that the world’s thinnest notebook is Macbook Air, we started wondering whether there was something wrong with our high school mathematics. Ok…we pose this question to the readers: Is 0.72 inches(Toshiba protégé 2000’ thickness) less than 0.76 inches(MacAir thickness)? If you vote for the latter, congrats, you are in league with the Apple people.

Amidst huge expectations, the Macbook air comes in to the ring and if you had expected Muhammad Ali to beat the air out of his opponents, then you are in for a rude shock. Watch out! Tyson has bit your ear.

Yes, the Macbook air is simple and beautiful. But that is art and I am not an art lover. And neither is technology art’s soul mate. It is so thin and sleek that you could keep caressing it. But, this is not Carmen Electra.

The Air opens and closes with a magnetic latch. It has a Core 2 Duo chip that has been redesigned such that the physical size is reduced by sixty percent. The LCD screen is backlit with LEDs. This saves battery and dims the screen much lower than CCFL screens for additional battery. The build quality is excellent - While using the air, you never feel the edge of the front wrist rest, because it is so narrow. The keyboard is black and backlit. I can use the air for eight hours without feeling the pinch. (But, that will never happen as the Air lives for three hours in one life time as against Apple’s claim of five hours) There is an isight camera above the screen and keyboard. It records to 640 by 480 res which is same as any other isight. And then there are the laser cut grills – one is a light sensor that adjusts the keyboard and the other is for the microphone. There is a single speaker that is louder than the speakers on Macbook.

The feature that was displayed in all the 4 presentations that were made in the Macworld by Steve Jobs contained few things in common, the most notable ones being the 3lbs Air that fits into an envelope and the demo of Air’s capability to access the optical drive of anther PC.

Now, we come to the interesting part:
There is no built in removable media. There are no security slots and Ethernet portals, though a USB-to-Ethernet adapter may be purchased separately.(Wow, that’s quite an option. Look out Google, there is competition for the Google Sky). There is a single USB port and it has to contend with the companionship of a headphone jack and external monitor port. There are no Cardbus or Expresscard slots. There is the optional 64 GB solid state hard drive, the first of its kind in Apple’s laptop computer. It can be preferred over the standard 80 GB hard drive at the cost of some extra dollars with no great improvements.