GPS Devices Life

combining PDA and GPS is very clever; you can have it for only $300! - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver OK, my wife had 2 items on her Santa list: new PDA to replace her ancient one, and GPS unit for her car, as she ge...

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Problem: How does one go about selecting a GPS Navigation System suitable for use on a motorcycle? After a disappointing experience with a small hand-held unit, I put together the following list of requirements:

1. Full autorouting with voice prompts and automatic rerouting when detoured.

2. A color screen clearly visible in daylight.

3. A full-featured, searchable database of businesses and addresses within the mapped region.

4. The ability to store a large database of maps for long trips.

5. Able to run on battery power and rechargeable by house or vehicle current.

6. Small enough to move around easily.

7. Possessed of an internal antenna good enough to navigate in mountainous terrain.

Although dedicated GPS units like the Magellan Roadmates, Garmin Streetpilot series, and the TomTom Go units pretty much fill these bills, I was still a bit disenchanted with all of them, primarily because they do not fit well in the front pocket of a pair of Dockers, my sartorial homage to the Clinton Era and better times. Although some of them do run on battery power, they simply aren’t designed to be carried around on foot. A GPS PDA, it seemed to me, might just be the answer. There are a few manufacturers building these, but I was pretty much dead set on a Pocket PC based unit, since, God help me, I already know how to use one and am not interested in switching over to the Palm OS. Enter the Garmin iQue M5.

The Garmin is a regular Pocket PC with all of the standard applications (Word, Excel, I.E., and Windows Media Player) built in. But at the rear of the unit there is a little sliding button affair. Push it and a nicely incorporated GPS antenna pops out turning the PDA into a full-featured GPS navigator. The unit can run on battery power (it uses a removable lithium-polymer rechargeable) or on either house or automotive current. It comes with two powered cradles, one for the house with a USB connector for syncing and file transfers, and the other with a standard cigar lighter plug (with a powered speaker) for vehicular use.

Also in the package is a set of CDs with Microsoft Outlook 2002, ActiveSync, (for communications and file syncing) and the Garmin mapping utility. In the USA, the M5 includes City Select v6.0, North American edition, which contains the Garmin maps and searchable database of points of interest. This database contains street addresses, businesses, ATMs, and the like.

Out of the box, the Garmin isn’t much of a navigator. The problem is that it has only the barest of basemaps; major highways and little else. Compounding this issue is the fact the built-in memory of the M5 is only 128mb total, most of it already used up by the operating system, basemap, and applications. On my example, there was 32mb left over for detailed maps.

Fat lot of good that will do you: 32mb of maps is like 32 seconds of sex.

No, in order to use this thing, you had better figure on buying an SD Memory Card; the bigger the better. I bought a 1Gb SanDisk Card at the same time I picked up the M5 at Best Buy. Trust me, you will want a big card. With mine, I was able to load the entire western half of the US and Canada, including Alaska, plus another big swath of maps running across the middle of the U.S. all the way back to the Carolinas and encompassing all of the Midwest. This mapset took up 770mbs of space on the card but will leave me in good shape if I get a wild hair to ride back to Illinois for a Buona Beef (N 41° 49.994’ W 088° 01.240’) sandwich and top it off with a trip to Graceland Mansion (N 35° 02.829’ W 090° 01.509’) for souvenirs.

After loading the maps, I had room for 54 MP3s. Cutting that down to just 20 songs, I had enough room to fit 3 audio books on the card (about 14 hours worth of listening). Not bad. Although I will certainly be able to get by with just the one card, a 2Gb card would have been a better choice. One of those will hold the entire North American map system and still leave a little under 500mb for tunes and such.

Speaking of tunes, this is where the iQue is heads above any of the dedicated GPS boxes. Once you have the cradle wired up it is easy to incorporate the M5 into the audio system of your vehicle, particularly if it’s a Honda Gold Wing. It will play music, read you a book, and when a turn comes up, it will mute the audio program and announce the upcoming turn for you. For the money of a dedicated GPS unit, you get GPS plus a full featured media player.

Navigation: Minus a few weird quirks, the M5 is an exemplary routing and navigation tool. It allows you to pick areas you wish to exclude (I-405 between the San Fernando Valley and LAX), “via points” you wish to visit along the way, and what types of roads to use or avoid. The first time you power the M5 up, it takes a few minutes for it to get its bearings. Once it has downloaded the GPS Almanac, a repeating broadcast put out by the GPS system announcing each satellite’s orbital position and health, the iQue wakes up and starts to navigate. Its accuracy is astounding. It uses 12 channels for navigation and also has a built-in WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System – a differentially corrected GPS signal from a satellite in geo-synchronous orbit) for greater positioning accuracy in North America. For example, I used the iQue to find an obscure dirt road outside Trona, CA. Although there are about a million obscure dirt roads there, the M5 told me just which one to turn on. Later, when I viewed the track file (a saved log of points you can view on the map and download if you like) it showed that I had been, well, exactly where I had been!

Routing is simple, not simple enough to do while driving or riding, since you need to use a stylus to input what you are looking for, but simple enough to put together on the roadside. Once the route has been calculated, you need do nothing more than check it for sanity (more on this in a minute) and start driving. Once you are on the road, if you get detoured or stuck in a logjam and need to get off the freeway, the M5 will automatically recalc your route and direct you around the obstacle. You do not even have to watch the screen. A pleasant female voice will tell you when and where to turn. The device adapts its voice prompts to your speed. If you are hauling the mail, it warns you a mile in advance of any turn, plenty of time to change lanes. When you are moving slowly, it waits until you are closer before bugging you.

When I mentioned that you needed to check the route for sanity, the reason I did so is that on a few occasions the iQue has given me some weird, bad, routes. When I went back and redid them, they came out fine; it may have been that I simply gooned it — but the way I look at it is if I can screw it up, so can you. For this reason, when you are asking the device to find the shortest route to Bum*#^%, TN (N 35° 29.688’ W 085° 00.740’) be sure to look the route over before hitting the gas.

Since the iQue M5 is more than a simple navigator, any prospective buyer must also realize that he is going to have to learn to use a device that is just more complex than a Hertz Never Lost. The GPS system consists of several different, interlinked programs. In order to find something, you have to start the QueFind program. To see the map, you have to know how to select the QueMap program. It’s not hard, but it is certainly more involved than using a touch-screen device or a voice-activated system like those found in your average Acura. The iQue helps a bit in this regard by providing a “Q” button on the lower right of the unit. Pressing and holding the button causes the device to tell you how far it is to the next turn. A quick press causes the M5 to cycle between all of the GPS programs. (Map, Find, Turn-by-Turn, Route, Almanac, etc.) But still, it is not a trivial device to use.

Of course, this also has benefits. Far more than being a simple GPS device, the iQue is a perfect road entertainment center. With a couple of big SD cards, you can load it up with enough audiobooks and music to keep you entertained all the way across country and back again, and not get lost once.

There are, of course, tradeoffs in this. I already mentioned the added complexity of burying GPS functionality in a multi-purpose operating system. The iQue is also not quite as robust when it comes to visualization as, say, the Streetpilot C330 or TomTom Go. It cannot render your view into a 3D lookahead like those devices. And another thing: I do not think the screen of the iQue is as easily read as some of the better, dedicated, units in bright sunlight. It’s pretty shiny – very reflective of glare. I addressed this issue by ordering an adjustable mount for the powered cradle on my bike. Once it comes in, I will be able to adjust the angle of the screen on the fly. Again, I do not anticipate having to look at the thing too much at speed since the main means of navigation is by voice prompting. But the iQue does give you an extremely accurate readout of your speed and I like having that reference available when I ride, almost as much as I like the tunes, books … and directions!

There are also tradeoffs in the PDA realm. By choosing the iQue, while you get the Bluetooth radio, you do not get 802.11 wireless Internet. In order to make that work, you are going to have to buy an SDIO wireless adapter, another expense on top of an already expensive PDA that you had to outfit with a memory card just to make useful.

More proof that no system is perfect …

On the other hand, when I hop off the bike and go hiking, geocaching, hot-springing, camping, the iQue will slide easily out of its cradle and come along with me, always ready for a nice game of solitaire or video poker, always loaded with tunes, books, videos; and always ready to point me in the right direction home.

In closing, a caveat: I am writing this after only 11 days of ownership. The mountain passes aren’t open yet so I haven’t been able to ride across the Sierras to test how well the iQue handles satellite masking and dropped tracks in a hostile environment. I have been able to use it indoors with good tracks, and when they drop, the M5 is quick to reacquire a signal within seconds of repositioning the antenna. But the true test is to take it up in the wilderness and really wring it out. As soon as I get a chance, I am going to do so. If I encounter any problems I will modify both this review and my rating accordingly. I think it will do fine, judging by what I have seen so far, but if it doesn’t I will be very disappointed and share that emotion in an update. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment or to email me at the address listed in my profile.

UPDATE:

I still haven’t had a chance to wring out the M5 deep in the Sierras, but I have been quite busy with it in other venues. In June, I took my motorcycle from California to Key West, Florida and back. Over the course of the long ride the M5 just rocked. It got me out of traffic jams, got me back on track when I diverted to interesting spots, and generally did a fine job. I also ran into a point that I had not considered in the first review: Rain. The M5 is not waterproof. I hadn’t thought of that, so I mention it now. I got a mount that allows me to power it up in the car cradle with it attached to my handlebars, but when the rain started falling I had to shut it off and stick it in my pocket. I think the answer is to find a watertight covering with a clear vinyl face that will protect it during thunderstorms, but any potentiol buyer will need to keep in mind that using this thing on a bike is going to require adaptation in wet weather. Not a big deal for me since I live in the desert, but if moisture predominates in your neighborhood…

A couple more idiosyncratic points. The thing is too flipping smart! When you plan a route, say you want to travel from no specific address in Montgomery, Alabama to no specific address in Jackson, Mississippi. Well, you put those two cities into the route planner and have it calculate a route. What it will do is navigate you to a centroid of that destination city. No kidding, the M5 routed me to the middle of some multi-million dollar residential area down south somewhere. I was mystified that it wanted me to keep turning deeper and deeper into a housing area — until I figured out what was going on.

Remember it is only a computer. Keep it dry, and do not assume it understands the subtleties of your path. Feed it pure, reasonable points to navigate between, points you really want to be at, and it will get you there.

My rating does not change one bit in this update. I listened to great tunes, got a bit of solitaire knocked out in quiet moments, and for the first time in my life enjoyed the pure freedom to just take off down any road I needed or wanted to go down and still get back to the main one without getting lost in the process. Now, all I have to figure out is how to keep it dry in the rain.

Update 6-18-06: I had a chance to take the M-5 up in the Sierras a couple months ago. It tracked perfectly, losing track maybe once or twice, for a couple of seconds only. It has proven to be a dependable navigation device and PDA combined. The screen is starting to get a little scored from all the games of solitaire, but overall it is doing quite well. I still would not hesitate to recommend this unit.

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Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver

Garmin iQue 3600 GPS Receiver, getting you where you need to go - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver

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