Advantages: FAST acquisition, good battery life, BlueTooth Disadvantages: Price
The NavMan4410GPS kit is effectively two discrete things. Hardware and Software.
For the sake of your very own eyes (and sanity) , dear reader, I have split my review into two to cater for this. This one covers the hardware, the neato BlueToothGPS receiver and it's associated gubbins. The software is covered elsewhere (in the SmartST Pro Europe sub-heading). But be warned, it's a biggie.
The NavManGPS receiver is a fine piece of kit. Slightly bulkier than a mobile phone and made of a reasonably impact-resistant plastic, it has a tacky (as in sticky, not gaudily coloured) rubberised base to stop it sliding around and a single button on the top with which you switch it on/off. Able to run from 3 AAA batteries for an amazing 30 hours (under optimum conditions), it also comes with a Cigar lighter adapter for a more reliable power ...
Advantages: Tiny, appealling, accurate, powerful and desirable. Disadvantages: Rubber cover for DC power supply breaks off easily.
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This back cover also plays host to a couple of long oval rubber feet, which seem to grip pretty much everything - certainly, on my desk, you have to really drag the receiver to overcome the friction of these feet.
OK ... switching the device on entails holding down the power button for about 1 second. That's as difficult as the device gets. It has just one button, and three LEDs.
Once the device is on, it begins it's search for GPSsatellites. The three LEDs are pretty simple. The one with the battery symbol next to it indicates when you need to charge the battery (and with a 17 hour battery life, it's not very often). The middle LED, the green one, indicates your current GPS lock, whilst the bottom, blue LED, indicates your Bluetooth connection status.
Incidentally, the green LED flashes when you have a GPS lock, and is constant ...
I dont have a 20 channel receiver however I do have a 12 channel receiver which came in the box with my Tom Tom Navigator 5 for PDA, whichi I use in my Treo 680 Smart Phone. The whole thing works perfectly and I couldn't ask for more as Sat Nav goes.
The GPS receiver looks identical to the 20 channel one shown here and if this one works as well as mine does then you can't go wrong.
It has a matt cover which makes it stay put where ever you place it on the dashboard and in use I've found that it picks up a signal very quickly and once linked to the PDA by bluetooth it keeps the signal so long as it can see just a tiny bit of sky. Once linked I take the unit off the dash and place it on the floor of the car in between the seats and it keeps the signal through motorway tunnels and even during a traffice halt under a bridge! It does link ...
