Missives from the 6th Floor

Loading the maps onto the SD card is fairly straight-foward, albeit time-consuming, even with the built-in SD slot on Dawnise's notebook (I never tried loading them using the GSP USB cable, as the manual advised against it if a direct SD writer was available). I figured that if I chopped up the continental US correctly, I could probably fit all of it onto the card. Each map was limited at 64M, which was enough - for example - to contain WA, OR, a sliver of Idaho, and enough of BC that we could navigate to Scott and Amanda's place. (Course that would require that I get my blasted passport renewed, which is depending only on getting passport photo's taken - a simple act I forgot again when we were at Costco last night...)

The on-device interface, however, is pretty bad. Searching for addresses requires you to enter a street name (ok), and doesn't give you any way, other than a linear search through the results, to disambiguate between occurances of common streets. Search for 1st Ave and you could spend all day looking for the 1st Ave in downtown Seattle as opposed to any of the other 1st Aves scattered around the current map.

Once you find an address, and tell it to route you there from where you are, it takes about 15 seconds to compute a route. Fifteen seconds seems pretty reasonable, but becomes an eternity when you make a wrong turn and need to recalculate the route based on your new position. To add insult to injury, we never got the "off course" alarm to work. It had two opportunities on Sunday, and despite being set to trigger when we were 500 feet off course, never did.

Once you notice you're off course (as we did on the way home after a 12 mile stretch of 101 that didn't look familiar), you have to manually tell the unit to recalculate. At freeway speed, you're almost guaranteed that it tells you to take the exit that you're just passing when it finally get's it's bearings.

We discovered that the note in the manual about how the device can't always do the right thing when faced with non-planar graphs (ok, they don't actually say 'non-planar graphs' in the user manual) can become incredibly crippling in a real-world scenario. While looking for one winery, the GPS was telling us to make a right where no right existed. We took the left instead, and discovered that the road looped around under the freeway, and that once we cleared the underpass and recalculated the device "got it right" again. <geek-aside>Being unable to bound the possible transitions between two intersecting roads seems like a problem with the way they're representing the map graph internally, but I'm just guessing...</geek-aside>

Anyway, in a few months one of the Magellan Road Mate models goes on sale at Costco. We played with the demo unit for a few minutes last night, and it looks like a much better fit for Dawnise. It isn't weatherized, which rules out the motorcycle handlebar mount, but if we really wanna take it with us, we'll toss it in a ziplock and keep in in a tank-bag.

In the mean time, I've got $90 worth of mapping software and windshield mount that I can't do much (anything) with. I'll probably see if I can sell 'em on ebay.