Gumball drivers race on T-Mobile's navigation

CoPilot Live, HTC and T-Mobile provide mobile navigation for the 2007 Gumball 3000 Rally

26 April 2007 15:37 GMT / By Ryan Haynes

Drivers racing through 17 countries in 7 days are using the T-Mobile MDA Compact III smartphone and ALK's CoPilot Live 7 Mobile Navigation.

The race which starts at Pall Mall in Central London on 29 April 2007 will make their way to Frankfurt via Amsterdam, at which point all vehicles will be loaded onto enormous Antanov cargo planes and flown to Istanbul.

The rally then heads back from Asia across Europe in less than a week, passing through Athens, Tirana (Albania), Dubrovnik (Croatia), Bratislava and Berlin before driving back to the finish line by Big Ben in London on 5 May 2007.

The journey is 3000 miles and to keep them on the roads (for as long as there's no satnav inaccurracies) the drivers will be using T-Mobiles MDA Compact III smartphone with its built-in navigation.

With this, you can keep track of the drivers online because the system will monitor every turn and stop of the rally.

So a little about the smartphone: built-in GPS receiver works on CoPilot Live. Based on the Windows Mobile operating system, offers a full range of PDA features, allowing users to keep up to date with emails, and read and edit attachments and other documents on the move.

Two-dimensional and 3D maps are easy view using
the phones Trackball and Track Wheel on the 2.8-inch
colour screen.

Celebrities taking the journey include Jamiroquai's Jay Kay, Star Wars' Hayden Christensen, MTV's Xzibit, Caprice, Danny Dyer and The Fun Lovin' Criminals.

Full tags

Phones, Mobile phones, T-Mobile