A GPS Units For Everyone

There’s no doubt that the time has come; everyone is on the map now, quite literally.  GPS units are officially infiltrating American life at a rate that even the most enthusiastic advertisers of the technology might not have dreamed of.  People are using GPS units for everything from finding their way from point A to point B to finding out what restaurants are in their vicinity. 

Now there’s a concept!  Whatever happened to driving around an unfamiliar place looking for a nice place to eat?!  Or, an even older solution:  stepping out of the car and asking a local for their suggestions?  Yes, GPS units are heavily permeating American life as cell phones were just starting to do ten years ago.  The reasons are many and varied, and so are the forms; GPS units are no longer strictly handheld GPS devices.  The 21st century has brought GPS technology to everything from computers, to cars, to cell phones.  Maybe in five more years our wallets will have GPS chips so that if they’re stolen the police will be able to find them for us.

How Useful Is GPS?

According to the waves of consumers who are buying GPS units, GPS is the greatest thing to come around since the mp3 player.  The most-often cited reason for adoring one’s GPS device is the capability that it has to get you from one place to another without getting lost and without trying to read a map or read the Mapquest directions that you printed out, and spilled coffee on when you took that sharp turn a while back.  Yes, when it comes to driving unfamiliar routes, there’s no doubt that a GPS unit is a very handy thing to have in the car with you.  However, is it worth the price? 

Younger consumers, the device generation, could not more emphatically reply that it is absolutely worth the price.  Older generations of consumers, and sometimes the parents of the aforementioned device generation who are riding shotgun in their children’s cars, often disagree.  Whether it’s for the cost (automobile units costing $200-$400 and subscriptions for cell phone GPS costing more than $10 per month) or simply because they don’t find GPS units to be necessary, many older people find the GPS revolution as annoying as they found the cell phone revolution five years ago. 

Though this is the official stance of many people, it shouldn’t be ignored that many of those older men and women who, five years ago, were complaining about all those youngsters having cell phones now have cell phones of their own.  Will it be the same for GPS?  Only time will tell.