Dakota handheld as a reward in new OpenCaching.com tour

 

As summer winds down, things are really heating up at OpenCaching.com. In addition to looking for our first class of OpenCaching.com ambassadors, Opie and our OC crew just announced their biggest sweepstakes yet. First we gave out limited-edition geocoins, then we awarded chirp wireless beacons to lucky cachers. That was just the start. Now we’re giving away Dakota handhelds to weekly winners throughout August. Starting Aug. 1 and going through Aug. 28, every 10 approved caches that you add will earn you an entry to win a Dakota 20 touchscreen handheld. While this specific sweepstakes is open to U.S. and Canadian residents, many of our international offices are cooking up exciting promotions to share with their respective countries as well.

Entering the Sweepstakes is easy (click here for official rules), as every 10 approved caches you add at OpenCaching.com will give you a chance to enter. Once you’ve entered, be sure to check your inbox to find out if you’ve won. We’ll notify each week’s winner the following week. And by all means, feel free to try, try again. After all, publishing caches doesn’t just push you closer to a chance at winning, it also gives your fellow cachers another chance to make great memories in their next outing. And if you’re a diehard cacher who just loves telling their friends about this popular pastime, be sure to click here to apply to become an official OpenCaching.com Ambassador.

Of the countless emails we get from happy OpenCachers, their most frequent request is that more of their fellow cachers would list their geocaches on OpenCaching.com! Know a fun place to visit near your home? Hide a cache for others to find. Already have caches listed on another site? We provide a page to easily import those listings and let others discover your caches. Whether your importing your existing caches or creating brand new ones, geocachers everywhere will benefit as a wider audience gets exposed to your creativity and enthusiasm for caching. Good luck, and happy caching and creating!

iPad 2 with Pilot My-Cast

 

Grab your ponchos! It’s a rainy day here at Oshkosh and we invite you to keep dry inside the Garmin Hangar (Hangar D). If you haven’t yet had a chance to come by our booth, you’ll want to make sure you do because you could be the lucky winner of an iPad 2 loaded with a one-year subscription to Pilot My-Cast. Just ask a Garmin associate for a Pilot My-Cast demo and you will receive an entry form.

Pilot My-Cast is Garmin’s premium aviation charts, navigation, weather and flight planning application for smart devices (including iPad) and is available as a 30-day free trial in the iTunes App Store and Android Market. Visitors here at Oshkosh have been wowed by the features and capabilities of the app, which include georeferenced approach plates, GPS navigation, airport diagrams, a dedicated panel page, sectionals and more. And we’re not done yet! We’re always coming up with new features and functionality for the app, so make sure you follow Pilot My-Cast on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with new releases.

Google Android with Texas Instrumets

Texas Instruments and Google are hooking up on Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android that will run on both phones and tablets.

Though TI has been a player in Android phones (most notably the Motorola Droid series), it has been largely absent from Android tablets, which are populated with Nvidia’s Tegra chips mostly. That is expected to change with Ice Cream Sandwich, however, which will finally fuse the phone and tablet versions of Android into one.

Ice Cream Sandwich will allow developers to create apps once. The operating system, due in the fourth quarter, will be smart enough to figure out which type of device the app is running on and then adjust accordingly.

Texas Instruments and Google are pairing up for upcoming devices running Android Ice Cream Sandwich on top of TI processors.

(Credit: Texas Instruments)

As the above graphic indicates, TI will be a prominent part of the Ice Cream Sandwich rollout. This is a promotional image that TI will use for events “in the fall,” according to an e-mail received from the company’s PR representative today.

Though it remains to be seen which devices use TI’s chips, it has two competitive dual-core processors, the 4460 and 4470. The 4470 is of particular interest going forward.

This “is more than just a faster speed grade of the OMAP 4460; the new design includes significant graphics and memory improvements as well,” Linley Gwennap, who heads The Linley Group, a chip consulting firm, wrote in a research note.

The 4470 is rated at 1.8GHz, 20 percent faster than the 4460. TI has also modified the memory controller to support faster memory and the 4470 includes a PowerVR SGX544 graphics processing unit (GPU), which TI is also using in OMAP5, the next iteration of TI’s OMAP processor series.

“This GPU delivers twice the raw performance of the SGX540 in the earlier OMAP4 chips,” according to Gwennap. The 4470 is expected to sample later this year and appear in devices in 2012.

 

by CNET News