Heeeeelp!

[dabby]

Hi Everyone

I'm glad to find this site I can tell you... Here's my first post and yes, it's a question of course

So, I'm about to get a new company car, the fact that it's a lease car and the cost of the factory fitted VW MFD2 is £2000 here in Belgium means it's not really worth it. So, I am left with a plethora of choices on third-party systems. The choice is, to say the least, bewildering.

What are my options as I see them:

Dedicated GPS Unit
PDA with GPS antenna/add on
PDA with bluetooth GPS unit

The clear benefit of taking a PDA based system is that I can get myself a good PDA, today I have a SonyEricsson P800 and I could upgrade to a QTEK 9090 for instance and have a state-of-the art pocket PC+Mobile too.

However, I get the impression that BT based systems can be a bit fiddly and troublesome. On the other hand, the TomTom GO for insatnce seems like a pretty little thing and appears to work very well according to reviews, BUT of course I then don't get the PDA thrown-in.

Any advice on my dilema would be very appreciated. Cost isn't really a deciding factor here, I'm more interested in the best quality system. I'd also like to be able to have the whole of Europe in the system as I am living in Belgium and we often drive to Germany, Holland, France, Denmark etc.

Thanks!

[nej]

If the SatNav is what you are really after, and you could live with your P800 for your PDA stuff, then I'd go for the all-in-one unit. A TomTom GO can be had for under £450 if you look around and you should also look at the Navman units. Best you could do is go to a shop and try them out for yourself. Then, once you've decided, look around online and buy one a lot cheaper

[gadgetmug]

Wife has tomtom go, I have pda and tt3. Go has no problems at all, no crashes and works a treat. If you have to have sat nav for frequent use, Go is the answer. But the pda is essential to me.

[dabby]

gadgetmug - with your experience of both do you find that one is a better solution than the other?

nej - I've been thinking of getting a full PDA for some time, the QTEK9090 could be an all-in-one integrated solution, PDA, phone, SatNav, hands-free etc. I might even get it anyway to replace my P800 and get a seperate SatNav.

From reading the excellent reviews on this site I like the look of the Garmin 2620 mainly because it has whome of europe loaded, but of course it is expensive and doesn't give the 3D display like TomTom. Maybe TomTom will one day have a card will all Europe on it in detail but I think today it's just a major roads chip.

I don't know, need to do some more research.

Of course the PDA is the cheapest solution for everything I want...

[DavidW]

TomTom has a product page on map SD cards for Go - see here.

However, they look pretty expensive, as you have to buy all the cards you need, and TomTom are probably charging a fair amount for the card (you can now get a good 512MB card for around 40 pounds - which is something like 55-60 Euros). It does look as if you're paying something like 100 Euros per Go map (200 Euros for the USA - though that may need a bigger card) - which doesn't compare that well to 189 Euros for Navigator 3 Maps of Western Europe. However, if you only need one additional country, Go is a better deal!

I don't know whether the Go add-on maps are available from any resellers cheaper than direct from TomTom; I have been away from the forums for a while because of my poor health.


My preference would still be for a modern PDA, Brodit active mount and probably now Bluetooth GPS (I'm using a Haicom HI-303MMF in CompactFlash mode, but I bought that back when there were only a couple of Bluetooth GPSes and they were expensive). There again, on the PDA side I'm a power user - I'm currently using an iPAQ hx4700 with 1GB SD card.

Go is not aimed at my kind of use - but it has an important place in the market.


If you're unsure, it's probably best to price both options - presumably with a more mid-range PDA and 256 or 512MB SD card than my iPAQ hx4700 and 1GB SD card. You can then write down the advantages and disadvantages of both as you perceive them.

I am a huge fan of Pocket PC. I was at the hospital yesterday to see my neurologist, and, as is often the case, my notes weren't available (I'm working with several consultants at once; it sometimes happens that they haven't made their way back to medical records after one consultant has finished with them before the next one needs them). She asked me when I last had a particular test done, I pulled out my iPAQ, started Pocket Informant 5.5 and within a few seconds I could give her the exact date. As I said, I can't really write any more, yet the Pocket PC technology allows me to do so much. She was impressed!

Whilst in the waiting room I wrote a long email to a friend using Fitaly (the latest VGA beta version with the replacement DLL) and the built in email program. I sent the email over a Bluetooth link to my GPRS phone whenI left the hospital. I may well switch to a 3G phone with Bluetooth in the next few months - I deliberately stayed away from the new iPAQ with built in GSM/GPRS phone, also the VGA screen of the hx4700 is quite important to me as I do a lot of textual work on my Pocket PC.

Whilst waiting I was listening to music on my SD card quietly on headphones using Pocket Player (again, the latest 2.52 beta version - there will be a 2.52 release shortly, but 2.51 doesn't quite work correctly on a VGA device).


At the moment, using a VGA Pocket PC does, at times, require some experience in tracking down problems and getting hold of pre-release software that fixes problems, but that will soon change. Ordinary QVGA Pocket PCs don't have these teething troubles. Relatively speaking, all Pocket PCs cheaper than ever.

In September 2002, I bought my iPAQ h3970 for 560 pounds. To get wireless networking capabilities I had to add an expansion pack and wireless network card costing around 120 pounds together, which brought the total mass to well over a pound and made it impossible to find a decent leather case. The iPAQ hx4700 I just replaced all that with is around six ounces and cost 400 pounds.

The price drop in SD cards is even more spectacular! I once paid nearly 40 pounds for a 64MB SD card



David

[dabby]

That's a nice response Davidw, thanks for taking the time for that. I'm also thinking the PDA option is the est route and I need a phone PDA so the QTEK is the one for me. I think you get whole-europe maps when you buy TomTom and I suppose I get buy with a Belgium map for 90% of the time and then when 2GB SD cards are available put them all on that :D

Next worry then is indeed the mount and the BT receiver. I suppose the software is also open for debate...

[DavidW]

TomTom Navigator 3 for the Pocket PC includes a "Major Roads of Europe" map. If you want more detailed coverage, you can get the detailed country maps as an add-on to an existing copy of Navigator 3 by buying the "Navigator Maps of Western Europe" product.


2GB CompactFlash cards are available and fairly affordable now - some PDAs will take CompactFlash memory. 2GB SD cards - you may have a rather longer wait, as only now are 1GB cards becoming widespread.

There was a lot of problems getting 1GB SD cards working at all to start with; I know someone who had an early engineering sample which hardly worked in anything. I've not heard a hint of any larger SD cards from anyone, and 1GB cards were much longer in appearing that many of the early hints from the manufacturers led us to believe.

I don't think any individual TomTom Navigator 3 map is larger than 300MB, so you can simply use multiple SD cards to navigate yourself right across Europe. The only way of navigating from map to map in TomTom Navigator is to use Major Roads of Europe anyway.


So far as Pocket PC Phone Edition devices go, don't dismiss the new iPAQ 6300 device. I believe Lutz has used one. As I said in my earlier post, I steered clear of Phone Edition deliberately - though the lack of a VGA Phone Edition device sealed my choice for reasons I've already explained.

I've been burnt before by having an integrated device. I had a couple of Nokia Communicators which didn't support GPRS, and Vodafone's pricing changed to favour GPRS for my kind of Internet usage. With the advent of Bluetooth, I decided to switch to a Bluetooth Pocket PC and a Bluetooth GPRS phone; a decision I don't regret one bit. I don't need very tight integration of my phone and my PDA, nor does two devices bother me (especially as my phone spends most of its time in my front wheelchair bag being used over Bluetooth).

The applications where tighter integration is especially valuable aren't those I use. I send and receive few texts anyway - almost all my usage is voice or mobile Internet. In any case, I have a program on my Pocket PC to handle text messaging over Bluetooth. MMS (picture messaging etc.) is of no interest to me whatsoever. Meanwhile, it's far easier to get a decent full car kit for a mobile phone than for a Phone Edition device.


My next mobile phone is likely to be 3G. Bluetooth is a bottleneck to 3G data if full 3G data speeds are available - if I remember rightly, 3G WCDMA is capable of up to 384kbps, whereas Bluetooth maxes out at 115200bps. However, particularly with the pricing as it is, I don't care about the maximum possible speeds, and 3G should be much faster than GPRS. My Nokia 6310i supports at most 3 downstream and 1 upstream timeslots, which means a peak download speed of around 39kbps.


If Vodafone would offer the Mobile Connect data card tariffs as an add-on to a 3G voice tariff, I'd probably sign up as soon as a wider range of phones become available. 20 pounds a month for 75MB would make me moderate my data usage rather less than I do when paying £2.35 per MB.

You can't use the 3G data cards with a Pocket PC; they're Cardbus, which means that they don't work on the handful of machines with PC Card slots (as neither Pocket PC nor the hardware has any Cardbus support). I don't need two mobile terminals anyway. Maybe, in time, we'll see a CompactFlash 3G card, but I'd rather use Bluetooth with a 3G phone to be honest.



David

[dabby]

You type quick too 8O :D

I want detailed maps of Europe all on one device, I want to be able to go from a street address here to a street address in Provence with a minimum of fuss.

I'll check the 6700, the QTEK 9090 though it PDA with Windows 2003 second edition and W-LAN, GPRS, BT etc.

[dabby]

Sorry, I meant 6300, typo...

[DavidW]

I believe the two Phone Edition devices you and I have mentioned are very similar - check both out, see what you think. 6300 isn't the exact model number of the iPAQ, but the range - the quad band GSM/GPRS version is the iPAQ h6340. It has 802.11b, Bluetooth, FIR and the phone hardware, though a processor that's on the slightly slow side (Lutz has said in the past that it's still no slouch, though).

Details on the h6340 can be found in the HP UK web site here. If you look around, you should be able to get it cheaper with a phone contract (I'd never buy directly from HP - they charge RRP which other companies will undercut).


Typing speed - I believe I'm somewhere in the 80-90wpm bracket. I can't write, but I can use Pocket PCs (either with a folding keyboard or Fitaly) and I can type. Technology is such a blessing for those of us with impairments!



David

[dabby]

So, I invested in the QTEK 9090 as promised - the 6300 iPAQ's are not as high a specification as far as I could tell. I'm delighted with the QTEK, it's a beautiful piece of kit and as big a step-up from mu P800 as the P800 was from a normal mobile phone.

So, the next steps are, what mounting bracket to use, which BT receiver and what software. I see this new integrated receiver/cradle looks quite nice from Holux, is that a good option?

Thoughts?

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