I got to play with both the new BlackBerry Curve models for IT Pro recently and now the review is up. The design of the Curve 8300 enabled RIM to fit in a full size QWERTY keyboard and a large enough battery to deliver the excellent life BlackBerry users are accustomed to, while still producing something small enough to carry everywhere with you. Adding an extra radio for GPS or Wi-Fi on these devices means even more options but has RIM managed to keep the impressive battery life as well? And as you can only have one extra radio - which one should you choose?Read on!

What's 3G got to do with 3G? Add in the location of the cell tower and your GPS-enabled phone can look in the right part of the sky for satellites, so it gets a fix more quickly and uses less power to do it. Online POIs are more up to date, you can get maps over the air rather than loading them in advance and calculating a route on a powerful server should be faster than doing it on your phone. That's the theory: on our last US trip we checked out Ask GPS and Nokia Maps in practice. My review on Tom's Hardware reminds me of sunny days in Las Vegas and driving through the Cascades looking for espresso huts, taxi drivers in New York and Cincinatti who didn't know where they were going - and how often I longed to throw the N95 out of the window... I did Google Maps, Windows Live Search Mobile and Yahoo Go 2 back in the summer but I need to revisit Google Maps now it has the excellent locate without GPS feature and I want to review CoPilot 7 on the O2 XDA Stella... handy that we have a road trip coming up then...

Because we were playing a mediascape; it's a virtual real world GPS treasure hunt with added Whack a Mole. It was part of the latest London Girl Geek Dinner and it's huge fun. For full details with more pictures, see Mole at hole 2! No, hole 2!

I now have some of these on a GPS iPAQ including one where you help prisoners escape from the Tower of London and it would be a fun thing to do with a bunch of people. Whack a Mole is like rounders without a bat or ball and UXB is Battleship, Boggle and Mastermind with added beeping. On a serious note I think place-coded gaming will be a big thing and place-coded information will be a big thing, but I'd quite like to just play Whack a Mole again!

At http://www.polarfrance.fr/Live_Race_Data/Polar_Live_EN.php you can get the heart rate, speed and altitude of a handful of Tour de France rides wearing monitors - you can even click to see their location in Google Maps.

Now I'm sure it's just a glitch; it's well after the stage should have finished and I'm guessing the rider in ths picture has taken his monitor off and left it in the car. Either that or he's very unwell, and in an ambulance!

Last time we were driving around the US (Nevada/Arizona/California) we were using the Benefon TWIG as well as our old favourite, ALK CoPilot on a Windows Mobile smartphone to navigate, backed up by Microsoft Windows Live Mobile Search (or whatever the five mile long name actually is), with a touch of Yahoo Maps. It's not that I don't like CoPilot enough: in fact the only thing I like more is the new CoPilot 7, and that's compared to TomTom as well. It's that the rental didn't have any power to the lighter socket and we couldn't charge the Bluetooth GPS unit that we use with the phone. The TWIG was disappointing in many ways; the Teleatlas maps are very impressive, but you can only pick a point of interest by type and name, not location. At one point I was *this* close to navigating us to the MGM Grand in LA instead of the one in Las Vegas.... Benefon promises the next version will fix this and has some other interesting plans besides. But what you want from a GPS might be different from what I want personally; in which case, check out my guide to Choosing a Handheld GPS over at Gear Digest...