Saturday, February 18, 2006

Cachemate: Now for the Pocket PC!

Wow. We just discovered that Cachemate had released a version of their famous Palm OS caching utility for the Pocket PC so I quickly headed off to Smittyware's website to download the demo version, and boy was I surprised.

Cachemate is really no different from GPXsonar, except for one very critical thing: speed. Now we cache with a terrific PDA-GPSr combo which is entirely paperless and quick. Using mapopolis to get driving directions to a cache, BeeLineGPS to get us directly to the cache on foot, and then GPXsonar to get us details about the cache to aid us in locating it. The problem with this is that GPXSonar is a very demanding program on any PDA and is often slow to use--very easy, but slow nonetheless and on a cache-busy day every second counts.

Enter cachemate. Cachemate dispenses with the unnecessary graphics that GPXSonar has, and is all text based. Cachemate is easy to use, easy to search for caches, and contains all the details that you need to find any cache--what makes it different (and worth the $8) is the speed and little PDA memory the program demands. We can now have Mapopolis, BeeLineGPS, and Cachemate open all at the same time with no effect on speed and usability.

In a nutshell, if you use a PDA to cache you NEED to get cachemate. It's required-ware.

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