MN4 Observations

jrl · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 17, 2004 Posts: 3

Received my Navigon MN4 with TMC & Bluetooth from Home of Hardware in Germany ( http://www.hoh.de ) 2 days before a trip to the South of France so had something of a baptism of fire - having never had a sat nav system before.

Firstly the TMC was great both in the UK and France, I also liked the option of ignoring a traffic warning rather than just being auto re-routed.

Map data was also very accurate (apart from the odd junction that the French had replaced with a roundabout) and plently of warning was given approaching a change of course.

What was not so hot was the Bluetooth GPS/TMC unit. My IPAQ 4150 would lose the connection from the unit every couple of hours or so which to say the least was very annoying. Re-establishing a connection involved exiting MN4, resetting the GPS making the connection and entering the blasted PIN code again before going back into MN4 and reloading and recalculating the route - what a pain!
I did completely delete the connection and repair the device once I was down there which has improved things but we still had a couple of drop-outs on the way home.

Lastly the battery performance is very poor in my opinion at about 4hrs tops - which means on a longish run you need to keep the device plugged in to the car power socket - and I found myself asking why I didn't just buy the cheaper cabled version in the first place !

Sorry if this is a bit of a long winded post but I hope someone may find it useful if you are considering buying/upgrading.

OhBuggerit2k2 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Feb 06, 2004 Posts: 48

Like jrl, I received my unit just before a trip to France. I have just spent a week in Brittany. I had the time to make a custom map using all of the UK and France to give me plenty of scope. I also had time to add a VGA hack to get the most from my map screens.

My unit is equipped with Bluetooth and TMC, using a Toshiba e805 WM2003SE, Bluetooth CF Card, 512mb SD Card, Seidio G2500 Mounting Kit.

Fortunately (sorry jrl) I never suffered from the BT drop out and my unit performed admirably all holiday taking me to all sorts of places.

The TMC performed very well, in the UK tagged onto Classic FM which seems to update for the whole UK, and in France I let it roam, at one point I had 238 warnings logged, was re-routed twice (thank you - avoided a 15mile tailback on the autoroute).

All in all a great system. My only complaint was some lag/confusion at certain points of the journey, usually at a roundabout, where it could not seem to make it's mind up whether I was going to use a roundabout or not, offering me the 3rd left turn instead of third exit before the roundabout and then the 3rd exit when I had passed the roundabout.

My battery offered up around 6 hours to re-charge, and it's a shame that the charger plug (PS/2 > Mini USB) does not fit my Seidio so my hopes of having a free cigarette lighter socket where thwarted.

All in all I would give a 9/10 for this package.

prusling · Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 9:32 am Post subject:

jrl,

I'm considering buying the complete MN4 package and www.hoh.de looks very competitive; was it a trouble-free buying process?

Probably a silly question, but can the unit be used without the bluetooth module if it becomes problemmatic?

Cheers,
Peter (Poole, UK)

Hunnymonster · Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 10:38 am Post subject:

www.computeruniverse.net are worth a look - as unlike most German sites, they actually accept Visa/Mastercard - prices are pretty competitive too.

jrl · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 17, 2004 Posts: 3

Peter,

HOH were very good ordered Tuesday received 1 week later, this included 2 days to receive the bank transfer which you have to go down to your local branch to do (this costs £20 but HOH are a lot cheaper than anywhere else I found). They update you with emails (albeit in German) and the well packaged unit arrived by Parcel Farce , sorry Force as promised.

I have thought about buying a fortuna BT GPS to benefit from the extended batterylife and the XTRAC for use with MN4 but then I would lose the TMC.

Having thought about it a bit more the 2 occasions when it droped out on the way home where at or near Peage plazas so I wondered if the Ipaq had been bombarded by loads of other high powered radio signals which forced a disconnect?? Just a thought.

Julian.

Hunnymonster · Posted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 3:18 pm Post subject:

My exceptionally well packaged order arrived from Computer Universe this morning - 5 days after ordering (including the weekend obviously) - and I didn't choose the expedited shipping either :D

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