Some advice for a newbie please

soreilly · Occasional Visitor Joined: Aug 27, 2007 Posts: 3

Hi guys,

Been reading this forum for a couple of hours now going over all the options. Basically I'm going away with the family (seven people in total split over two cars). None of us have a GPS device because we have never really needed it before. However we thought it might be useful for this trip. We are reluctant to paid £100 each for a GPS device so we've been looking at the other options.

Now I have a Sony Ericsson K800i mobile. I was thinking I could purchase a BT308 GPS receiver unit from eBay and use the Nav4All software. Has anyone done this and can anyone forsee any problems.

Now my father has an old HP iPaq rz1710 from work. I was thinking I could pick up a second hand cradle and GPS receiver, again from eBay, and put something like TomTom on the iPaq. Is there any particular GPS software which works better with the receiver?

Thanks,

Stuart.

mikealder · Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 7:53 am Post subject:

Please be aware that the Nav4All software is reliant upon your phones GPRS connection to download the map details it requires all the time. Depending upon your phone contract this could get very costly on a long trip, if you are travelling overseas then the cost will be even worse.

You would be much better served using a navigation package on the 1710 but even that device will be at its limit due to the slow processor, TomTom version 6 is best used on devices over 300MHz - your dads iPAQ clocks at 203MHz so its a bit slow. See if you can get hold of a copy of "TomTom Navigator 5", or consider "Route 66 navigate 7" another very capable application.
Make sure you keep the device powered up in the car when running GPS based mapping applications as they can flatten the battery very quickly if left unplugged - Mike

Darren · Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 8:44 am Post subject:

In my experience whenever you try to achieve a decent solution on the cheap it invariably fails. Nav4All is very poor.

There are some offers on decent PND GPS devices such as the TomTom ONE, Asda have a good Medion unit on offer for £99 etc that would be much better solutions, is there any reason why you can't make do with one and go in convoy?
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Darren Griffin

soreilly · Occasional Visitor Joined: Aug 27, 2007 Posts: 3

Mike,

I have Web'n'Walk from T-Mobile so GPRS costs aren't an issue thankfully.

Darren,

Re the convoy question. We may end up going to two seperate locations and meeting up later on in the day. I'm just trying to plan for all eventualities.

Stuart,

Darren · Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 10:03 am Post subject:

soreilly · Occasional Visitor Joined: Aug 27, 2007 Posts: 3

Cheers. I'll have a look.

Stuart.

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