I IMed with Hubert Nguyen from Ubergizmo.com yesterday who told me about his nice review of the Ftech Solar 7 Bluetooth GPS Receiver. There are a lot of buzzwords in that product name, so let me summarize. This is a solar-powered GPS that can communicate with a Bluetooth-capable handheld or notebook so you can add navigation functions when you need them.
The innovation here is solar power. The tradeoff is the size of the GPS which is larger than many competitive products because it incorporates a solar cell.
The Ftech Solar 7 is about $130 and you still need a piece of navigation software for your handheld or notebook. Having said that, I like the idea of a self-powered GPS for the car, and it would clearly interface well with my Treo 650. I doubt that I’d ever need to charge it as long as I put it on my dashboard whenever I was going to use it.