A Kosher GPS? ¡Ay, Mio!

Awesome. What more could you possibly want?

The Jerusalem Post just posted an article about a Kosher GPS, made by Mio Technology. (Get the double entendre in the title now?) Ooooh.

How is a kosher GPS different from a regular GPS, you ask? Good question. Here’s what it does:

Lists thousands of Kosher restaurants.
Has Tehillim (Book of Psalms)
Has all three daily prayer services.
Has a Hebrew Calendar.
Has additional prayers.
Lists thousands of synagogues, mikvahs, cemeteries, and holy sites in Israel.

Yes, this device is awesome. Too bad it’s only available in Israel. If they made it work internationally, it would make traveling as an observant Jew 1,494,4259,925 times easier than it is now. Traveling observantly is oh so difficult for many reasons. What are those reasons? Well, here’s a few of them, in no particular order:

You’ve got to find kosher food everywhere. Or else you’ll be hungry.
You’ve got to find a place for Shabbos. Or else your Shabbos meal will consist of the expired NutriGrain bar in your backpack and some grape Powerade. Also, no one likes to spend Shabbos alone.
You need to know prayer times and Shabbos times. Otherwise you may end up saying the morning prayers in the evening, and the evening prayers in the afternoon! AHH, insanity!
You need to know where you can pray with a minyan. Your prayers are stronger with a minyan.

And probably many more reasons that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

The list of kosher restaurants is probably the best aspect of this new GPS. If you find and print out lists of kosher restaurants online, they are bound to be outdated because either the restaurant’s closed, it’s lost its kosher certification, it moved, or for a host of other reasons. I once read a story about these two Americans who were traveling in Spain, and they spent half a day looking for a kosher restaurant they read about online only to find out, once they’d arrived at its door, that it had closed down a couple years ago. Sad story. So hopefully this GPS, if they ever take it globally, will be accurate. It’s nearly impossible to compile all that information without traveling to all those places and checking out all the supposed kosher restaurants… maybe I’ll write them a letter proposing that I travel the world looking for kosher restaurants for them. That would be a great job. Traveling and eating. Fun.

If this GPS comes out in America, I’ll buy it. In fact, I’ll buy two - one to keep in each pocket.

Anyway, promethean little device. Very much so.