Satnav recommendations?

Ive got the newer model mio - the A201 (i think). My 'holder' is a magnet affixed to my dash and another stuck to the back of the PDA! (it is actually in the plastic cradle that clips onto the screen arm and the magnet is trapped in the back of it). Works perfectly, is easy to remove and is not obvious and the thing will even stay in place while laning/offroading in a 2A!

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The 101 Forward Control Club and Register

Reply to
Tom Woods
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Want ......

:)

Reply to
Paul - xxx

A few months ago I had an Ariston (IIRC) fail after one wash, they tried to make me wait for an 'engineer' to call, then tried to give me a reconditioned one, I had to quote chapter and verse of their on-line terms and conditions (Currys this was) before they accepted I was due a refund. I ended up buying a cheap brand at half the price and was rather miffed to realise it was the same machine with a different fascia fitted!. It transpires that all washing machines come out the same huge factory in Italy no matter what brand they are badged with.

A few weeks ago my Whirlpool freezer started having a dicky fit and as it was just outside the warranty I dismantled the control panel to find the reservoir cap on the power supply was cooked as it was too close to the hot transformer. Absolute crap design or deliberately built in obsolescence, you be the judge. The PCB came from, you guessed it, a factory in Italy!.

Two weeks ago I had to weld the door hinge on my Whirlpool fridge which had fallen to bits, the same Italian factory.

Last weekend I took back a Sony HiFi with a duff CD player after only

2 months use.

etc etc

The point I'm trying to make?, the brand used to mean something but it doesn't any more, consumer goods are rattled off in huge factories which make them for any brand. The owners of brands we have traditionally associated with quality are cashing in by putting their badges on the same unreliable crap as everybody else and hiking the price. Obviously people will eventually become wise to it and the brand will have lost it's value, but in the mean time they are making huge profits conning people.

Getting back to SatNavs, high volume consumer electronics like these are designed in contract design houses because companies can't afford their own R&D facilities, increasingly these are in India where there is a pool of well educated engineers working for a fraction of western wages. They are then manufactured by contact electronics manufacturers for the same reasons, most of these are now in China. The chances are that none of the names in SatNav actually design and make their own products!.

In general, discounting brand X because you've bad a bad one is at best pointless and you will soon run out of brands 8-).

That I can well believe, putting a delicate hard drive in a car is just silly, especially now that hard drives are on their way out with Giga bytes of flash costing just a few pounds. The best thing to do is to discount models with hard drives rather than discount brands.

Greg

Reply to
Greg

Tomtom do, ex Psion staff. Of course you can open up a tomtom unit and you'll find that the components aren't manufactured by tomtom, they don't make the ARM chips, the memory chips, the hard discs, the screens etc, they're all off-the-shelf components made by the likes of fujitsu, Intel etc.

Large chunks of things like DVD players are made from similar components, e.g. drives and motor control by phillips, decoding and control chips ARM chips with multimedia add-ons etc etc. Designing a DVD player these days is often just slotting together all-singing all-dancing components with very small component counts inside, easily done by cheap designers while the complex stuff, designing the components themselves, is left to the high-tech companies. Even my very old washing machine is made with many components shared between other brands, just the same as my landy injector pump etc etc can be found in lots of other cars. IIRC not even the axles are unique to land rover.

The whole "designed in India" thing's not as bad as it's made out to be, Indian staff might be cheap but you do get what you pay for, I know of a few companies who have had programming work done over there by various indian companies and all the results were very poor and working at a distance plus the language barrier made matters worse, so they use home-grown staff again now as the money saved in staff wages was offset by the extra time spent making the cheap crap they produced actually function to specification. Similarly my own field of work, computer security, does have some inroads made by overseas operations but given that's also where all the organised hacking gangs are (especially Poland, Romania, Russia) due to poor economies and lax law enforcement, many companies refuse to have work done by overseas staff and explicity state that it must not happen.

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

earwigo

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Lee

Reply to
Lee_D

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LOL, I've looked all bloody over for something that'll fit in the Disco, I guess I must be blind or stupid ... no contest really, 'cos I know I can see ....

Cheers. ;)

Reply to
Paul - xxx

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Or just get an old harddisk and pull it apart. They have a couple of really strong magnets mounted on small bits of metal with screw holes in.. 2 screws through the hole and fix one onto the dash and then put a bit of metal or another magnet on the back of your pda. My PDA sticks to it in its leather cover with some pennies shoved in the back of the cover! Some mobiles stick to the magnet too!

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Reply to
Tom Woods

Rich B a écrit :

I can't recommend my Navman N60i highly enough, and that comes from a GPS hater after having 3 others that were awful (Navman included). Has full European maps, and even has the latest roads in France (which is where I use it a lot) and that is saying something because the French are going through a huge road-building phase. Easy to use, never let me down yet and is in almost daily use. Last time I saw, Halfords had them on special at 299, but that was a while ago now.

Matt

Reply to
Matthew Maddock

Well, now you've left this is probably too late but others might like to know. If you keep an eye on the following site you can spot some interesting deals floating about;

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As an example, Garmin Nuvi 300, £165 or thereabouts in most places, but for a short period of time, £100 in-store at Asda. TomTom One, £150 most places, in-store at Asda £100. You do get some real bargains cropping up quite regularly on the site and it covers lots of different things, even RAC cover (which I got cheap).

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

With 'undreds of PDAs out there which ones have built in SiRF GPS and WiFi (for email and web) that can run routing software (with 7 digit postcodes) when driving and overlay your position and past path on a 1:25000 OS map image when out walking.

The Mio A201 doesn't have WiFi nor does the P350, the P550 has WiFi and seems to fit the bill. I think the only HP iPAQ offering is the rx5935 Travel Companion. Any others from other makers?

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Dave, HTC's Artemis has SiRFIII GPS and WiFi as well as GSM.

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It's a lovely device with a trackball and jog wheel for navigation. Available branded under other names in packages from O2 and T-Mobile

Reply to
Darren Griffin - PocketGPSWorld.Com

And a hundred squid on the price tag over the P550. I'd rather keep my phone separate to the PDA/GPS. Out on the fells my phone will last a very long time, from what I have read of PDA/GPS combinations they are only good for a handful of hours at best.

I'm on Orange...

Been doing a little bit more digging today and PDAs with GPS and WiFi do seem to be very thin on the ground. No Palms offer it.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Thanks for this. I'm also looking at a Garmin which seems to do what I need for about 250.

I found the fault all by myself - corrupt map file for the Canary Islands! I backed up all the others, formatted the HDD and reinstalled. Worked fine - until half way through the holiday, when it lost all its maps again. I've been back to Tomtom and cursed them by email, and it looks as though they are finally going to replace it. If they do, it's going straight on eBay, unopened, and I'm going to buy a product that a) works, and b) is supported by proper customer service. Form past experience, anything with Garmin on the box will deliver that.

Reply to
Rich B

Purely because it's main use will be perched on the bike I am (eventually) going to buy a Garmin Zumo 550, after taking a deep breath in financial terms.

FWIW

Richard

Reply to
Richard

Ah yes - I did look at the Zumo, but at half a grand it needs to make the tea, clean the house and service the car as well as navigate. Most of my biking is local and day rides, where I usually know the roads, so a car-based system at half the price makes more sense. It is *rather* nice, though.

Reply to
Rich B

Sounds like my Navman Pin its been replaced once and still has the same problem locks up when I change display mode they now think it may need a software update ? I like the email reply "Depending when you purchased your navman for instance if purchased within 28 days then you could get it exchanged" interestingly they don't seem to subscribe to the 'Sale of goods' act regarding faulty goods perhaps I should ask Nige to explain it to them ? Up to now I've resisted the urge to slag them off but I'm getting a mite aggravated - not recommended as I tend to treat 'Get even' as a crusade mission statement. Whats more annoying is that the features are exactly what I want, it can play mp3s and if I port it into the radio the sat nav instructions interrupt the music. Derek

Reply to
Derek

Hi Rich

I've been sitting on my credit card for over two years now trying to decide which SatNav to buy. Primary consideration is one of relieving my wife from having to map read as a pillion during our periodic tours. She's very good at it but tends to use an 'inertial navigation' style of map reading, i.e. we will approach a junction, she'll look at the map and the give the instruction. She doesn't develop a 'feel' for the land from looking at the map. Having said that, it is much easier than having a map on the tank bag. Although, it does tend to go to pot when struggling through cities.

Secondary consideration is that her map reading style is not compatible with car driving (bit of an exaggeration) but she cannot predict which lane to be in at big junctions and relies on reading the road signs - something I can do just as easily! Last minute lane swopping isn't generally a problem on the bike but can be a little traumatic in the RR! This leads to a certain 'tension' ;-) between us when we are in the car!! She knows what I think of her map reading, which only makes things worse. Thus, I'm partly selling the SatNav as an aid to marital harmony.

Yes the Zumo is eyewateringly expensive and you must add one of Touratech's lovely brackets, but it is far superior to the TomTom Rider.

And don't forget that Garmin were pioneers in the SatNav game.

Oh, and the Zumo offers a physical connection for the earpieces, not a bloody Bluetooth connection.

Richard

Reply to
Richard

TBH sat navs aren't much good at this either, they can be useful but I've had two different makes (tomtom and viamichelin) and they both made an effort at lane instructions but often got it wrong. Another area that can be annoying is when coming off a motorway onto a roundabout, you often don't get the instruction on which exit off the roundabout to use until you're already very close to it, so don't give up those last-minute lane-changing techniques just yet!

At least you won't get the cold shoulder from swearing at the sat nav!

Sat navs are still ace, although I'm tending to avoid using mine for non-complicated trips as it's all too easy to end up not having a clue where anything is, similar to the way so few people can remember anyone's phone numbers these days what with mobiles.

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

Now that's very true. Slowly but surely we are de-skilling ourselves. The technology is great, but if we let it get to the point where we can't live without it, we're allowing ourselves to become very vulnerable to a few blobs of silicon.

Reply to
Rich B

Bloody hell. Reeeeeeespect. Two days would be good for me.

Suggestion: train her to look ahead on the map and give you road number and destination towns *only* when approaching a junction, leaving the actual choice of lane and exit to you as driver/rider. So it's "you're looking for M4 for Reading, Swindon, S Wales", rather than "er, I think this is the turn-off, looks like we need to be going left, I think, er, yes, I think it's, er, yes, you want to be in the left lane here, I think, left lane, LOOK OUT for that LORRY!!! OK, yes, it's definitely, no it isn't, hang on, yes, it's the M4 isn't it, do we want westbound or eastbound, hang on, where's the sun, yes, it's LEFT NOW." Sound familiar?

So I've been told by Them What Know.

I've had a Garmin 12 hand-held for years, and all my nav kit on the boat is Garmin, and it's never failed or let me down. This is big factor in any future purchasing decision.

Reply to
Rich B

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