Palm Pre Multi-Tasking: Navigation and Music
Friday, 19 June 2009
The Palm Pre is playing music, while the Navigation chick's voice is giving turn-by-turn directions, simultaneously, with "ducking"
Using Palm Pre as a GPS (with Sprint Navigation) with Music player simultaneously is a beautiful thing. It is a great illustration on why webOS multi-tasking is so freaking awesome.
By now I’m sure you know that the Palm Pre offers real turn-by-turn GPS navigation. This navigation is designed for drivers, I haven’t figured out any way to make it work for walkers, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist yet. The navigation is impressively accurate so far (as long as my current location works, which so far its been a little hit and miss). The Palm Pre navigation app has a soothing voice telling you up-to-the-mile updates on where you’re going, even reminding you within increments of space that your turn is coming, or the off ramp, or whatever.
What’s great, is that you can be listening to some music plugged straight into your car’s audio receiver through a 3.5mm mini stereo cable straight from the port on your Palm Pre. The navigation voice will quiet down the music a little to announce driving directions (in the recording business they call this “ducking”), giving you a hands free GPS experience. Oh yeah, it’s a phone and you can also see it’s just finished downloading some email too. Can iPhone do all this simultaneously with the music and the turn by turn directions with the voice and the etc.?
No. 1 — October 25th, 2009 at 10:40 am
[...] the time I used it. I had the Navigation on and the music on, plugged into this FM Transmitter. The navigation with music worked like a charm, bringing down the music volume whenever the nice lady had a new instruction. [...]