The Ultimate Apple Weblog just posted a review of the official iPhone geocaching app on their site. Anna and I have been going out and geocaching on weekends using my iPhone. We had tried it out a year or so earlier, but she was just a little bit too young. It’s a good opportunity for the two of us to go outdoors and do something together. We inevitably end up near a park and stop and play for a little bit and she likes the hunting for the caches. It’s fun because you see things you wouldn’t normally see. We were in a really neat old cemetary weekend before last that had a lot of those turn of the last century ornate monuments. Some of them really have some great typography.

It actually makes for a good teaching moment on not giving up. With the iPhone, it will get you close to the cache… within 35-50 feet of it, but you do have to sometimes do some hunting. That’s one of the main complaints that the article has with it. Works great with open sky, but takes some extra hunting with tree cover. There were a couple of finds that took a while, which teaches her not to give up.

The app has a compass that works when you’re moving, and you can use the distance meter to triangulate the area where you should search, so if you want to try it out, it will definitely get the job done.

TUAW Review: Geocaching iPhone app - The Unofficial Apple Weblog TUAW.

Geocaching $9.99 [ iTunes link ]

The only drawback is the steep price. I think it should be about $5, personally. If you just want to give it a try one weekend, I would actually recommend you start with another app that will work just as well for you: Geopher Lite ($1.99 [ iTunes link ] ). It requires you to manually enter the latitude and longitude, but I found the compass to be a little more responsive. The benefit of the official app is that it formats everything in an iPhone friendly way and it will use your account on the geocaching.com site to hide caches that you’ve previously found. Plus, it will gain more and more features like logging your finds, etc.

Make sure you have a car charger for your phone… the GPS function eats up the batteries like mad. Expect it to only last about 2-3 hours.

I actually just bought a Garmin Oregon 300 for geocaching and auto navigation. Haven’t had the chance to get out and try it out geocaching yet, but overall, I’m pleased with it. The touch screen works pretty well, and the interface is pretty well thought-out. It’s water-proof, and you can easily load routes from Google Maps onto it, or caches from geocaching.com, including descriptions, hints, and logging features. One improvement I would like to see is a louder beep for car use.

I’ve installed the auto-navigation software so that it will function just like their dashboard units (doesn’t have a speaker, so it doesn’t do text-to-speech), and I’ve also dropped in the topographical maps, which aren’t that handy here in Memphis which is relatively flat, but when we’re out hunting for caches in the Shoals area, they’ll come in handy. Hope to give it a run this weekend.