BlackBerryInsight

This howto is about getting your favorite waypoint / point of interest / landmark collection into the Spot GPS & mapping application on your BlackBerry^® Wireless Handheld.

A “waypoint” is defined as “a reference point in physical space used for purposes of navigation.” (source wikipedia.org).

In this howto we will cover the import of GPX files into the Spot mapping application. GPX (GPS eXchange format) is the most famous format for exchanging GPS data. So you will be able to visualize your own waypoint along with your current position on a map on your BlackBerry. A very good example for our demonstration will be the Unesco World Heritage which has a lot of places all over the world that are geo-coded. As there is currently not an official GPX file available I downloaded the most recent version in Google’s KML format and converted it to GPX using the free GPSBabel program^*.

Technically it is very easy to import those files as Spot supports on the new BlackBerry devices (Pearl, Curve and 8800) file system access. So we can just copy the file to our device. As I am using a BlackBerry Pearl with a 1 GB micro SD-Card I just connect the Pearl to my desktop computer. A “drive” will be created automatically and I copy the .gpx file onto the SD-Card of my Pearl.

Once the .gpx file is copied to the BlackBerry just start Spot and go to “Waypoints - Import GPX (file)”. A file browser will pop up and you can navigate to the directory you copied your .gpx file to. Just select the mentioned GPX file and all containing waypoints will automatically be imported into your Spot’s waypoint database. They will also automatically assigned to a new category which has the same name like your GPX file.

You can now do all operations on these new waypoints (route, show on map, edit, delete, export, etc.). Spot is available for all current BlackBerry Wireless Handhelds and works well with the internal GPS receiver as well as with external Bluetooth GPS receivers. You can get a free demo version here:

Spot for BlackBerry - Free Demo: http://www.skylab-mobilesystems.com/en/products/spot.html

Have fun!

^* … That also works with tracklogs created by Skylab’s MobileTracker (which produces KML files as well) by converting them to GPX and importing them into Spot.

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