Designed to entice kids into giving the outdoors a try (instead of gluing themselves to videogames and TV), the Geomate Jr is a handheld GPS intended for use in a real-world game called geocaching. Essentially an Easter Egg Hunt minus the Easter Eggs, participants use the GPS to show the way to an unlimited number of existing “geocache” locations.
Functionally, the Geomate Jr is pretty decent, with a simple interface and easy to understand features. Reception is pretty spotty around tall buildings, though, and we encountered some minor issues with accuracy. Built for outdoor, not to mention careless, use, it’s very sturdy with splash-proof and shock-proof casing.
Child-friendly, it comes with bright colors (green and blue) and sports a narrow-waist for handling by smaller hands. The clear, monochrome display lends itself well even under direct sunlight. To make sure kids don’t play with it at night, it comes with no backlighting, making it unusable in the dark.
How It Works
When you turn the device on, the Geomate Jr determines its own location and shows a pointer on the LCD screen, along with information on the nearest geocache. There are various icons representing search difficulty, terrain challenge and cache size that turn it into somewhat of an interesting real-world game.
Players can cycle through nearby caches (it comes with 250,000 North American cache points, along with downloadable new ones online), deciding on which challenge to take on next. Once you’ve decided on a particular one, you can add a home marker so it can lead you back to where you started from after you’re done.
The Geomate Jr, just as its name implies, isn’t a full-fledged navigator. Instead, it’s a stripped-down GPS. As such, it lacks a few things we would have liked to see including a built-in compass (forcing you to walk a bit before it figures out your direction) and turn-by-turn directions. In a way, the lack of sophisticated abilities probably figured into the challenge of the game, so it’s all good.
Will The Kids Actually Play It?
That’s the most important question, of course. I’m pretty sure kids will love it – who doesn’t enjoy a treasure hunt, after all (especially since it involves a cool toy)? With that said, make sure you watch over the kids when they’re “on the prowl”. I can literally lose my way home after being engrossed in this for hours if I was a child.
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