Those of you who follow the Blind Bargains podcast will know about this already, so I'm posting this for those who don't.
Humanware has announced the Victor Reader Trek. It's a blending of the Victor Reader Stream with a Trekker Breeze Plus into a single device that looks like a Victor Reader Stream except that it is about 25% thicker to make room for the GPS.
No, it's not the same GPS chip the Trekker Breeze Plus used but a newer chip that picks up the satelites faster and can more accurately set your position, within 10 feet or 3 meters so they say.
It will have all the functions of the Victor Reader Stream plus all the functions of the Trekker Breeze Plus, plus several new features that both Victor Reader Stream and Trekker Breeze Plus users have been asking for for the past couple of years.
Probably the most prominent new feature will be the addition of Blue Tooth connectivity for output to speakers or headphones.
The microphone jack is gone to make room for the GPS so the headphone jack now accepts headsets as well as headphones, same for Blue Tooth as well.
They have also changed their map supplier. I don't know who they were using for the Trekker Breeze, but for the Victor Reader Trek they will be using maps from TomTom, one advantage this will generate is that instead of having the United States broken up into sections where you could only load 4 sections on the Trekker Breeze, the entire United States will be loaded. There are more than likely similar map expansions for other parts of the world as well, though they didn't mention them.
The current Victor Reader Stream has 8 GB of storage built in, the Victor Reader Trek will have 32 GB, some of which will be needed for the GPS system data and map.
The Victor Reader Stream will continue to be sold and supported, the Victor Reader Trek isn't replacing it, it is just joining the Victor Reader family of products.
The normal price of the Victor Reader Trek will be 699 US dollars, but is being sold at the preorder price of 599 US dollars until the end of the year. They are accepting preorders now and expect to start shipping in late October.
I've already preordered mine. (Big toothey grin)