UPDATE: This review was for the i-GotU GT-100. Mobile Action has contacted me and asked if I would try out the new GT-120. I’ve tested it, and posted the new results here. So far it’s worked much better than the GT-100 reviewed here, which has now been discontinued by Mobile Action. I’m leaving this review in place for archival purposes.

One word review – don’t.

Don’t buy this piece of junk. If it wasn’t already apparent from my comparison with the Garmin eTrex Legend, then let me say it again – the i-gotU GPS tracker is totally useless for geotagging.

I decided to conduct one more experiment. I turned on both GPS units about 30 minutes before I had to leave for work and set them on the dash of my car. This gave them a half-hour to lock onto satellites. The skies were clear this morning, so there shouldn’t have been any weather-related obstructions. On my drive in, I had my camera set up in interval mode as with the other experiments. The Garmin locked on quickly and maintained a lock. The i-gotU appeared to have locked on when I started out, but while driving the blue LED never blinked to indicate that it was maintaining a satellite lock.

The results were about what you would expect. The Garmin tagged the photos at neat intervals along the map, exactly as they were taken. The i-gotU found a location for only one of the 51 images – the first one taken in my driveway while it still had a satellite lock. The rest had no location information recorded.

As a final nail in the coffin of the i-gotU, I made one more discovery. The bundled software doesn’t actually geotag the image. It only matches up the image with the latitude and longitude in its own database, but doesn’t write anything to EXIF. There is an export wizard with an upload function that connects to Flickr. However, the geotag information isn’t uploaded to Flickr with the image. In short, it is totally useless as a geotagging program unless you are just going to view your photos within the confines of that program. The one redeeming feature is the ability to export the GPS track as a GPX file so that you can use a REAL geotagger such as Geosetter. However, that only works IF you get a decent GPS track, which I haven’t so far.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a piece of equipment that performs so poorly. I think I’ll be sending this thing back as soon as I can.

UPDATE: This review was for the i-GotU GT-100. Mobile Action has contacted me and asked if I would try out the new GT-120. I’ve test it it, and posted the new results here.

[tags]i-gotU, GPS data tracker, review, geotagging, photograph[/tags]