Reluctant to give Junior his own Garmin Colorado? The one that cost and arm and a leg? Leery about letting little Meg hold onto your precious Magellan Triton 2000 while the family heads down the trail? Well, if you’re taking the kids geocaching, now you can give them their own GPS unit for $69.95 courtesy of a company called Apishere. The Geomate jr. is no Cheap Charlie of a unit, however; it’s built around a SiRFstarIII receiver and strips away the fancy stuff, giving the user just what they need to find the cache — and, bless ‘em, it has a gear loop.

The idea behind the Geomate jr. is twofold, says co-inventor Warren Hewerdine: 1) get kids (and Mom and Pop, too) off the couch and outside playing, and 2) keep the GPS unit simple and easy to use. Hewerdine, who is senior director of marketing at Apishere, says he first got the idea while hanging out with his girlfriend one day, who was pondering how to get her nephew, who is into gadgets (can’t blame him, can we?), to get out into the great outdoors – exercise, fresh air, and so forth. The obvious answer is geocaching, the pastime that combines high-tech handheld gadgets with running around outside.

But, there is, or rather, was a problem.

“You can’t just walk into REI and say, ‘I’d like to buy geocaching,’” notes Hewerdine. Thus the goal with Geomate Jr. was to remedy that problem. “The way we want to do that is make geocaching a lot more accessible to kids and families.”

Geomate Jr. is a GPS handheld that is a dedicated caching device. Much of the typical functionality found in many handhelds today simply isn’t required for caching. The device comes with a preloaded database of 250,000 caches across the United States and a simple interface: an arrow that points to the direction of the cache, and the distance to the cache. Users can also view cache hints, maintain a found log, track their way back to their start point, and view an electronic compass, as well as their current latitude and longitude, if they want.

“It doesn’t really matter where they are, they can switch it on and go,” Hewerdine says of Geomate jr. users. He adds that the company’s goal is to make the unit ready to go “out of the box — to make it easy to get out and enjoy it.”

The company did presort the cache data, taking out caches that haven’t been found in some time, and concentrated on existing caches that have been around awhile. Hewerdine says in the future the company will release update kits that will provide more caches, including those for countries other than the United States. And don’t worry; Apisphere has a deal with Groundspeak, the folks that run Geocaching.com, so the data should be as good as one could get when it comes to caches. So you don’t even have to hook it up to the old PC and download files from Geocaching.com, or tinker with file conversion because your handheld doesn’t like GPSX files, blah blah blah. None of that. Come to think of it, I may need one myself.

Of course, the Geomate jr. isn’t a substitute for a multifunction GPS handheld, and it isn’t meant to be. Rather, it’s a means to use geocaching as an enticement to get kids and families outdoors, since caching is something a family can do together. On the other hand though, at $69.95, the device may prove to be a good beginner GPS device to us older kids that haven’t gotten into geocaching (WARNING: it’s addictive). And in a pinch, you could use the Geomate jr. to navigate, if you have a good topo map handy — after all, back in ye olde days of the first GPS handhelds, the early gadgets didn’t give you much more info that your coordinates anyway.

So if you’ve always wanted to try geocaching but have been reluctant to shell out the money or are intimidated by the fancy gadgets, check out a Geomate jr. Or if, like me, you just don’t want to cough up your gee-whiz handheld with the touchscreen and color topo maps and hand it over to sticky-fingered children, now you can afford to get the kids their own. The units are available at REI stores, REI.com and Geocaching.com. You can also get more info and see some videos of the gadget in action at the Geomate site (I would have embedded them here, but they aren’t embeddable – but you wanted to go to the site, anyway).

Needless to say, I pestered Mr. Hewerdine for a review unit, which should be arriving soon. Speaking of which, man, I’ve got three different gadgets from various manufacturers that are supposed to be on my doorstep in the next few weeks for our mutual reviewing pleasure — I’m like an antsy kid waiting for his birthday.

Update! My review unit arrived a few days after this was posted, so keep an eye out for a review later this month.

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