The better Car Cradle

stile · Occasional Visitor Joined: Dec 11, 2005 Posts: 6

I have just bought an IPAQ 2110 and want a car cradle that will power the unit as well provide GPS.

The two units I have seen are the

Thinknavi Speaker Mount and GPS Receiver All-In-one or the
Holux CR-100 Cradle with built in GPS Receiver

both of these seem like fantastic cradle and both have good reviews but if you had a choice between the two which would you recommend.

jimbo_hippo · Frequent Visitor Joined: May 18, 2005 Posts: 444

Stile,
I have a Holux CR-100 and my business partner has a ThinkNavi. Both are great and I had good support from Holux whilst my bus. partner had great support from Handtec so there really isn't much in it.

The only thing I would share with you is that these units don't like PDAs with phones built in as they make a racket when hunting for the next transmitter. See the Holux section for a few posts about this from me and others. So if you think you might go to a PDA phone then bear that in mind.

Other factors are whether you are ok about buying a different setup in its entirity when you upgrade your PDA. For example I use an SPV M2000 but have an eye on the M5000 now but it won't go in the CR-100 cradle so I would have to buy a new GPS reciever if I upgrade. Had I bought a cradle and bluetooth GPS I would only need to solve the mount solution. Plus if you use hire cars at all, you can experiment with positoning of a bluetooth reciever if you end up with a reflective windscreen or similar.

Also, the two cradles have recievers which may become old technology soon with the new generations of superb units popping up now. I'm not in posession of specs for all these system to give more details but do your homework in this area.

In summary, if you want an all in one solution to use in a known vehicle and you plan to keep it for a few years then these are great units. But you might wanna think a bit more about how you want to use your GPS before you dive in. However, both the brands are good and tech support from Holux has (IMHO) been invaluable so even going to another setup I would recommend them.

The (very long) discussion after the Holux review on this website contains a lot of useful info so I would recommend reading the whole of it to help you make a decision.
_________________
Tom Tom GO 720
Orange M3100, Orange SPV M5000
TomTom Navigator 6, Destinator 6
Holux GPSslim

stile · Occasional Visitor Joined: Dec 11, 2005 Posts: 6

Thanks for the reply.

I just have a plain PDA so no problems with that.

I am going to be changing my car in the future but I would be amazed if it had the windscreen you were on about. So that should not be a problem.

The PDA I have also uses blue tooth so if it comes to it I am sure I can just tell it to use that bluetooth received instead of the built in one.

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