I love seeing Judie over at Gear Diary excited, she's infectious (not bad-infectious like syphilis, though; I mean that you get caught up in her enthusiasm), and she was pretty damn ecstatic toward the end of last year when Spectec announced their SD/SDIO GPS receiver. Well, she's even more enthused now that they've actually sent her one of the dual-purpose microSD/GPS devices, but I find myself hoping that she doesn't actually swing her arms around in glee too much.

You see, the SDG-810, by virtue of fitting in both an antenna and a card-slot, extends quite a long way from the body of the smartphone.  Above you can see Judie's Treo 700wx with the adaptor protruding far past the controversial Treo aerial, and after the cut there's the same GPS module sticking out from an HTC Universal.

Personally I'm thinking that the sheer unwieldiness of the card will hinder its market success. Yes, it's very useful to have both memory expansion and navigation on the same device, but I'd be constantly aware of the potential for either snapping the Spectec card or somehow damaging the card slot in my smartphone. We'll have to see whether the performance overcomes those possibilities when Gear Diary do their review...

The Spectec SDG-810 GPS Receiver Unboxed  [Gear Diary]