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Update: I had an old PR link. updated with the proper link

This year's Consumer Electronics Show began Sunday in Vegas and already there's a flood of news for



gadget lovers.* Among the Virtual Earth news (stop by our booth if you're at the show for more) is our announcement with Garmin that their latest Portable Navigation Devices can receive individual Waypoints (addresses, business listings, any pushpin) as well as entire Live Maps Collections sent from your PC or Mac. What is unique here is that you don't need to physically connect your PND to your PC and it doesn't need to have a connection to the internet as the data is transmitted over FM airwaves. This enables you to do your trip planning at home on your PC with Live Search Maps and when you are done select the new 'Send to GPS' menu to have your location information transmitted to your Navigation device automatically. Plan a vacation by building a Collection of all of the attractions, Hotels, and landmarks you want to visit, then with once click you'll have them on your navigation system when you're on the road. Since you don't need to plug the device into your computer and it doesn't need a net connection, you can even send waypoints to a driver when they are on the road!

Garmin is using the MSN Direct network (aka SPOT) which allows their devices to not only receive waypoints from Live Search Maps but gas price information, real-time traffic, weather and movie time information. A PND with access to this data in real-time can do some pretty amazing things like route you around traffic jams on the fly.

Here's the Garmin Press release with information on the new models that have this impressive feature and a link to the Garmin blog to keep up on all of their CES news.