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Palm has offered GPS (global positioning system) peripherals for its PDAs and smartphones for a few years now. It is showing off the latest such device, the GPS Navigator, at the CTIA 2007 Wireless show in San Francisco this week.

Unlike past editions, Palm's newest GPS Navigator—due to ship in November for $249—doesn't get its navigation and mapping software from TomTom. Palm has shown TomTom the door, turning to its competitor Garmin instead the first time around. Garmin's no stranger to Palm OS and Windows Mobile, the two platforms Palm uses for its smartphones, however, as it has offered GPS-enabled PDAs using both operating systems over the years.

The Garmin navigation software—for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico—is preloaded on a microSD card; there's miniSD and standard SD card adapters for Treos that use these larger memory card formats.

When combined with the GPS Navigator the software allows you to use your Palm smartphone (Treo or Centro) to get turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions to find a destination and around six million points of interest (i.e. restaurants, hotels, ATMs, & gas stations), in addition to receiving updated traffic alerts, fuel prices, hotel prices and weather forecasts. If a turn is missed along the way, a new route is calculated automatically.

GPS Short Course: A GPS receiver gathers pulsed signals from as many of the two dozen or so GPS satellites orbiting the earth as it can lock in. Using triangulation—by measuring and comparing the travel time of individual signals—the receiver calculates its position, and it's accurate to within twenty yards or so.