How Many Hand Held GPS Systems Are There?
A lot! So many, in fact, that when I started researching to find the hand held GPS systems that would meet my needs, I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed with options. Not a bad problem to have… I love having options, but when it comes to making a decision, I am about as reliable as the current Global Economic system: I tend to crash and burn. So, how then are we able to find the right set of hand held GPS systems that will meet our needs? There is a simple solution to this daunting question: Open Forums!
When a particular market becomes overly saturated, so does the open forums within that particular market, and all of these open forums are free and easily accessible to anyone who is so inclined. All you have to do is type into any search engine (let’s just say Google) “hand held GPS systems” and you will have a plethora of customer reviews, open forums, comments, company histories, websites of these companies, different brands and models of hand held GPS systems starring you down like a lion ready to capture its prey. For me, at this point of my attempt at market research, I was like a mosquito in a nudist colony: I knew what I was there to do, but I had no idea where to begin. So, naturally, I went with the obvious choice… I tried sucking all of the information I could out of the first open forum that presented itself. What I found was simply striking.
Did you know that the majority of the comments left on these forums include sales pitches from the companies themselves? Of course, like any other marketing attempt, you are able to sort through all of the mumbo jumbo through critically reviewing the comments that were made. For example, I crossed off of the genuine list all of the comments that had a website listed (all of which were leading to a company website), sales pitchy adverbs and, of course, the comments that had absolutely nothing objectionable to say whatsoever.
Once I narrowed it all down, I found myself starring down the barrels of only two major companies that have gained a rather impressive reputation for providing excellent hand held GPS systems: Garmin and Magellan. These two companies offer hand held GPS systems that I have never heard of! One system provided golfers with a distance measuring sensor (awesome!) and another system offered Voice Command, where you don’t even have to touch the unit for it to know where you want to go. These two applications were mentioned in the more trustworthy comments, leading me to purchase a product that I have come to adore to this day!
