Rand McNally Unveils Powerful New Handheld GPS for Hiking, Biking, Geocaching & More

Jan. 23, 2013 – Expanding its presence in GPS navigation with units designed specifically for the outdoor marketplace, Rand McNally today unveiled its new Foris handheld device at the Outdoor Retailer show. The company also showed off its latest GPS for RVs and campers, the RVND 7720. Built for hiking, biking, geocaching, and other outdoor activities, the Foris 850 is “trail ready” with millions of miles of high-quality street and trail maps, a sturdy bike mount, and an easy-to-use interface with on-device help – all included. In bringing the Foris to market, Rand McNally worked closely with Falk Outdoor Navigation, a business unit of United Navigation Limited.

“We have aggregated and created the best outdoor content, and engineered the device with features needed for a variety of outdoor activities,” said Dave Muscatel, CEO of Rand McNally. “We are very excited to be working with Falk Outdoor, which is one of the leading players in outdoor navigation in Europe, to develop a product for the U.S. market. Leveraging their hardware and our content, we’ve been able to create a leading-edge handheld at a price typically reserved for more entry-level devices.”

The Foris 850 ships with contour maps and more than 5 million miles of U.S. roadways and trails on board the device – providing a much better out-of-the-box experience than competitive devices that require additional purchases and downloads. The Foris 850 device is unique in that it integrates routing and turn-by-turn voice guidance on trails as well as roads; it will even create navigable routes from “breadcrumb” trails that the user creates via the TrackNav feature. The device includes other unique routing options such as Loop Me! – a feature that creates a looped trail with the same starting and ending point, based on the user’s preferred time or distance for the outing – as well as options for a hilly or flat route. All Foris™ users get access to Trailhead, the Rand McNally web portal where they can download, store, and view their hikes and rides on desktop maps and more.

Other key features of the Foris include:

• Multiple U.S. map databases on device, including Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, U.S. National Park Service trails, National Forestry hiking trails and multi-purpose trails, U.S. National Wildlife Refuge trails, State Park trails, and the national hydrographic dataset, among others
• Millions of relevant points of interest including attractions, recreation areas, campgrounds and Rand McNally proprietary POIs
• Spoken and visual turn-by-turn directions with the ability to compare three alternative routes, with elevation profiles
• Paperless geocaching through integration with geocaching.com; all descriptions, hints,  logs, difficulty and terrain level on device
• Storage capacity for as many as 7,000 waypoints
• Barometric altimeter for accurate elevation – shows elevation levels on the map, along current trail as well as how far to the top of a mountain or other location
• All you need in the box – anti-glare screen protector for the 3″ touch screen (240 x 400 pixels), 8 GB internal memory, bike mount, and batteries included

Also at the Outdoor Retailer show, Rand McNally is demoing the newest version of its RVND GPS device – the first GPS device built specifically for RVs. The RVND’s award-winning navigation is used to safely route RVs and campers on appropriate roads. The 7-inch RVND 7720 has Wi-Fi connectivity allowing for real-time weather information and display, and new hardware with rugged casing, video input, and bright screen.