bit-tech goes Gumballing

Written by bit-tech Staff

May 2, 2006 | 17:18

Tags: #bam-margera #copilot #satnav #tony-hawk

Companies: #t-mobile #tmobile

We went along to the Gumball Rally at the weekend, to check out the technology - and of course, the cars - on offer.

The Gumball Rally is possibly the most famous and most glamourous race in the world. 240 super-rich drivers in 120 supercars race across three continents, racking up speeding fines and driving tickets in a bid to be the first to get from London to Los Angeles.

ALK is providing the GPS satnav for the drivers in the form of its CoPilot software, and they invited us along to go under the rope and get close to the cars. We couldn't resist the opportunity to let you know how we got on!

The CoPilot software is compatible with Windows Mobile mobile phones, and T-Mobile was providing its MDA Compact II phones to go in the cars. The CoPilot software was helpfully loaded up not just with the optimum route for drivers to take, but with a database of European speed camera locations too!

If you want to check out the progress of the Gumballers across the world, you can head over to alk.com/gumball and track them all via their GPS.

Let us know your thoughts on CoPilot and the Gumball over in the forums, and check out our pics below.

Oh, and a quick shout-out to Sandisk, who provided us with enough memory cards to shoot over 3GB of pics with our in-house SLRs!


The cars on display were absolutely outrageous...


CoPilot was installed in all the cars and engineers were on hand to help out with configuration.


One of the drivers makes use of the MDA, and another drives off in his Mercedes SLR, forgetting to close the door!


Celebrities were out in force to drive the first stage - skating legend Tony Hawk says hello to our own Wil Harris, whilst nutcase Bam Margera talks PHP with our resident coder, Rich Taylor.


No idea who the lovelies on the left are, but we did appreciate Jodie Kidd stopping to pose. Apparently, she really loves bit-tech.

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