Review by Dave Burrows, Darren Griffin
 Darren and myself headed off to the MotorShow Live 2004 at the Birmingham NEC, it's the last two days of the show and we wanted to attend, meet with ALK and also see what was on offer.
The weather didn't stop us, despite the weather forecasts as sunny for the day, even though the nice sunny weather on the outward journey decided to come over cloudy and overcast with the odd sprinkle here and there. Nor did the blow out we experienced on the motorway stop us! (Sorry no photo's of us changing the wheel!)
We bravely soldiered on and actually arrived at the NEC ahead of our anticipated schedule.
There were a number of key exhibitors at the NEC show on the GPS front. Cars and Gadgets go hand in hand with Toys for the Boys, so if you wanted to get a look at some GPS Receivers, GPS Software and Speed Camera devices, the MotorShow Live was certainly going to entertain you.
The first thing we saw when we entered the NEC was the go-kart track, where you had a chance to race around this once you had donned a crash helmet and fireproof clothes.
We met up with Dan at ALK, had lunch and a great talk, walked round the Evesham/ALK stand, checked out the latest Mitac Mio offerings bundled with CoPilot Live 4 from Evesham.
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Evesham were showing off a 3 wheeled snazzy car called the Grinnall Scorpion III with a Mitac Mio attached and CoPilot Live running courtesy of www.grinnallcars.com. Around the stand you could also see fully working Mitac Mio 338, 339 and 558 models which are also shipping with CoPilot. You will also notice a Mitac Mio mounted inside the car in the photo above!
Over at the Garmin stand, Garmin had two BMW bikes showing off the Garmin Street Pilot 2600 series rebadged as a BMW Motorrad Navigator II with a nifty little control pad added to the left hand side to make navigation much easier.
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Garmin were also showing off the iQue 3600, and the new GPSMAP60C/CS and the new Garmin GPSMAP76C/CS.
Over on the Blackspot Interactive stand, you could see both the old style (current) Road Angel with laser detector (one of which I currently have), and also the new Road Angel which looks similar to a cyclops unit, but silver. It has a great backlit display, but don't let the picture be deceiving, as the depth to the unit is still about the same depth as the original Road Angel. More can be found over at the Blackspot website, and is currently retailing for £399 with 6 months subscription.
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Other companies that attended were TrafCam Ltd, Speedtrapfinder.com, Midland Safety Camera Partnerships and TeleAtlas. The TeleAtlas stand was pretty bare really, it had a Navman iCN 630, TomTom GO (which incidentally wasn't working properly) and a dedicated in-car system on the stand, but that was about it.
And for all you car enthusiasts, yep we had to take some photos of some of the great cars on show at the NEC.
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Finally, Ford had a very nice stand, kitted out with the Thunderbirds theme by creating a complete mock-up of the film set and even had a Thunderbird (second photo below) hanging from the ceiling.
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Overall the day was enjoyable, we got to see some other neat technology like a new Radar Detector based around a rear view mirror being demo'd at SpeedTrapFinder.com for under £200, lots of nice expensive cars to see, we just wish we had more time to bring you even more for the repot!
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