Wayfinder - a newbie review (bit long)

[lindenteal]

Well, after asking for others to review it I thought I ought to add my initial thoughts on Wayfinder for the P800.

To put this review into context I am completely new to GPS, this is my first system, and I wanted one that had low initial outlay and wasn't fixed to the car. It had to have voice prompts as I intend to keep my eyes on the road and not on a beautiful screen when driving.

The package arrived today (20 Dec 03) courtesy of handtec of Peterborough ( www.handtec.co.uk ). It was, for the record well packaged and delivered as promised.

The box contains the EMTAC Bluetooth receiver, a mains charger with various country attachments and a car charger. An instruction booklet and an unlock code. The first thing to do is go to your PC and connect to the mywayfinder.com website. If you haven't got access to a PC then this is critical. Once my details and the relevant code were entered the application two files were ready to download. I was hoping for the option to have the application sent over the air to my phone but this was not possible with the P800 (I didn't spot this in my reading up before purchase but a friendly assistant at Wayfinder - international call to their call centre later) confirmed this. The files have to be transferred via my PC - via infra-red as the cradle and PC don't like each other. They are both around 300Kb so not too large.

Once loaded and the BT receiver charged up I turned it on, placed it on my south west facing first floor windowsill (very grey day here in North West Essex, UK) and it indicated that it had found the relevant number of satellites in 20 seconds from cold! This to me seemed very impressive indeed (and has continued to be as impressive). The application found the receiver, connected to the Wayfinder server (via T-Mobile GPRS) first time and accurately found my location.

I have spent the afternoon driving around the local area and have discovered that the software gets me to where I have set it to go but not necessarily in the route I would have taken. I'm sure you GPS old hands will have had this experience many times before. It does however re-route very quickly - around 10 seconds each time when I went off route and the soft Scandinavian female voice is easy to listen to.

My main gripe is that the instruction booklet is solely based on the Nokia screen and the software versions appear to be different. I am therefore having to learn by trial and error. I will be contacting Wayfinder to ask them about a P800 version.

My other initial observations are:-
1. All distances are in Km - I knew this before purchasing and accept it. To be honest I don't mind knowing a junction where I need to turn is in 1Km or 50m. What I need to know is when I need to turn and the software/hardware combination is good.
2. The screen prompts are clear and easy to read.
3. The EMTAC receiver works very well through my car windscreen despite the numerous heater elements running through it. (Not tested with the heater on yet).
4. Website is very easy to use - www.mywayfinder.com - and routes can be calculated here and emailed - not SMSed - as I had hoped. The best bit is the 'localise' function where locations can be identified and saved then sent to the phone. The hard work done on the PC.

Hope this isn’t too long and I would be interested to hear other's comments.

Kind regards

Philip

[lindenteal]

I have now had a week to play with my Wayfinder solution and here are the latest experiences.

1. The sofware remains generally accurate. On the odd occasion, when entering a roundabout the voice guide can be informing me of 100m to go to the roundabout. This has happended on 10% of uses. Can anyone comment if this happens with other GPS solutions?

2. The instruction booklet for the P800 is available from the mywayfinder.com website. It is five pages of the whole web-based instrcution booklet.

3. On one occasion the P800 ran faltlessly on a route until 2Km from the finish when the software crashed and the phone indicated on-screen for it to be truned off. I don't know what caused this. It has never happended before (not just with Wayfinder but at any time) or since. Has anyone ever had this experience with the P800?

4. Are these posts of any interest to anyone?

Kind regards to you all.

Philip

[MikeB]

Phillip,

Keep them coming. We are testing out Wayfinder here and our review will be released shortly.

I find the voice instructions quite interesting sometimes. I often get the 100 meter announcement going round roundabouts. There is only one other package that I have used that does that and that is Mapsonic.

You should try routing from your place to Southend to see how good the routing is. The lower part of the A130 isnt on the maps. I live near Rayleigh and have terrible trouble heading up your way.
_________________
Mike Barrett

[MikeB]

The PocketGPSWorld.com Wayfinder for Nokia 6600 review is now up on the site click here for the full article
_________________
Mike Barrett

We see you’re using an ad-blocker. We’re fine with that and won’t stop you visiting the site.
Have you considered making a donation towards website running costs?.
Or you could disable your ad-blocker for this site. We think you’ll find our adverts are not overbearing!