I had a long chat with Richard Calthrop Owen at the show and he explained what's been changed. Some of the changes are things we pointed out in our review - there's a blue dot so you can distinguish your position from your track, previously both were red dots. You can also now hide all non-active routes, which is a very good move if you have a lot of routes in a small area.
The big change though is the battery life issue. Personally I didn't have a lot of problems, but I was using good quality, high power rechargeables and minimising screen use. Apparently the problem was that the screen was refreshing five times second, which was more often than the GPS was actually updating, doh. Now the standard setting is - from memory - once per second and there's a super economy setting which refreshes once every four seconds.
As you can imagine, that's potentially a big power saving, so I'd expect that side of things to improve drastically. I'd also suggest that using new known good quality high power rechargeables rather than older batteries that may not hold anything like as much power as claimed is a good idea. And apparently the battery indicator now works properly. Before it tended to show full power for ages, then three bars then crashed through the floor. There's now a warning and a reserve setting which Satmap reckons could last as long as 40 minutes before the unit switches off.
There are a couple of other things we'd like to see changed and it looks like that may happen in the future. First we'd like an on/off switch that requires a sustained - say 2-second - press to work, so that it's harder to switch the unit off inadvertently and lose your track, something that's happened to us a few times. We'd also like a basic seal to stop water getting in between the screen and the removable polycarbonate screen protector.
Our test unit is being upgraded by Satmap right now and should be back with us shortly, hopefully in time for the Easter weekend, so we should be able to update the review shortly. Existing Satmap owners can get the upgrades on a Compact Flash card and install them at home.
The Satsynch software to enable you to transfer route data across is now available on the Satmap web site which should make it a lot more useable for people with existing mapping software or access to routes in different formats.
The one obvious gap is that the online planning facility isn't available yet. I've found it very easy to input routes using just the unit and with occasional reference to a paper map, but I can see that being able to use the maps on a large screen would make things easier in a macro-planning sort of way.
So... in theory the upgrades should cover many of the issues some users have had, in practice, it's wait and see, but you shouldn't have to wait too long, we've been promised a quick turnaround.
looks like it is still way off the mark for my liking. i think i'm going to wait until they get all the niggles sorted out. i don't have the patience anymore to be "sympathetic" to problems aka beta testing, especially at the price.
all my planning and review is done in tracklogs and the satmap is going to have to work seamlessly with that.
On the Mac compatability issue I called Satmap before Xmas to express my enormous disappointment that they had failed to deliver on Mac compatability. Particularly as they made so much of this in their initial marketing.
What disappoints me more, having made a purchase purely on the basis of this promise is their complete silence on the issue, with no update on their site nor indeed any mention of any intention ever to support Macs.
They said they had two people working on it but 'it had turned out to be much harder than they had initially anticipated'.
They also said they were soon to be hosting a user forum on the Satmap site where discussion on Satmap issues, including the failure to deliver on their promise of Mac support could be aired. Let's see..........
As they clearly have a relationship with OM for purposes of reviews, further marketing etc I'm sure they must be aware of these forum comments. They said they had a constant stream of users asking for an update on the promised Mac support and I really do think they could at least post a comment acknowledging their failure and giving an update on their progress to address the issue.
I've just got the latest Garmin unit with OS mapping in on test and I'll be running both a review of that next week, plus a side by side with the Active 10. As a standalone unit, I now think the Satmap is very good, but I share your annoyance on the Mac compatibility front.
It's understandable because Satmap is a smalll company and deserves a lot of credit for beating the big boys to the punch on putting OS mapping on the unit, but - and I understand this too because I know how long it can get relatively simply tech upgrades sorted on the site - a lot of their development takes longer than they think it will.
The new online route planning facility is obviously well under way because I've seen it in action and it looks good, but again is taking longer than planned to get up and running. And once it does appear, I can't see how it'll work for Mac users. It is annoying because all that's really needed is a utility to allow you to upload and download GPX files to and from the unit with a Mac.
At the momet, I get round it by dual booting my Macbook into windows and using it as a PC where necessary, but it's a far from ideal solution.
I will, as part of the review process, ask Satmap what's happening as far as Mac compatibility goes and with the online route planner and report back.
Thanks for the response and appreciate you taking up the Mac compatability issue with Satmap as part of the review process. many thanks in advance.
I agree that the Active 10 is an excellent stand-alone unit but it promised to be so much more than that.
I could also boot into windows but don't want to have to purchase a windows OS purely for that purpose, with the associated virus risks and inconvenience; especially not for a product bought on the basis that it would support Mac OS.
I can run everything else native, including Microsoft Office, on OSX and that's what I want to be able to do with my Active 10, as originally promised.
Jim, me too. I never connect to the net using Windows, I use it purely to connect to the Satmap, if I download any GPX files, I do it in Mac mode then drop them into the windows partition. The Windows stuff is there purely for the odd mapping software test plus running VAG-com which is VW diagnostic software. However the Windows OS is a work one, so cost me nowt and I used the Bootcamp beta which is also free, so a cheap solution for me at least.
Anyway, I'll speak to Satmap next week and see what the Mac situation is.
> It's understandable because Satmap is a smalll company and deserves a lot of credit for beating the big boys to the punch on putting OS mapping on the unit
It's not rocket science; a colleague of mine has created a GPS mapping application (akin to SatMap) for Win Mobile PDAs in his spare time, and not much spare time, either. Admittedly, he has a lot of mapping experience, and is very good at what he does...
> It is annoying because all that's really needed is a utility to allow you to upload and download GPX files to and from the unit with a Mac
Which should be a trivial task, frankly. Again, GPX files aren't rocket science; a bit of simple xml parsing is all that's required. I'm a hardware engineer, but I bet I could write a GPX parser in awk in a couple of hours, and I'd only use that (somewhat inappropriate) tool because I'm familiar with it.
This is what Satmap has to say about Mac compatibility:
'Mac compatibility – Satmap have a software engineer giving this full attention, as they’re very keen to meet their obligations to Mac uses. At this stage they’re not able to put a timeframe on getting it finalised, but rest assured it is being given priority treatment.'
Ok, can anybody actually say how long they get in real time from a set of batterys. Either rechargeable or normal type please. Have a Road Angel with memory map at the mo and can get 6 hours from that but find it not long enough on a long walk. Cheers.
With the Unit set to minimum power use (can't remember what the actual title is, as I don't have it with me), normally 2 days for a set of Lithium batteries.
Thats 8-10 hours a day - my last trip was 18hrs moving, so the SatMap was on for slightly longer than that with one set of batteries.
I've not checked the rechargeable battery, as I'm normally out for longer than it would last between charges.
It's still incredibly slow to get a fix when turned on though.
depends upon how you set the unit up. bright screen intensive stuff (track or north up) uses more battery power. can't help with the time because my lipol battery pack hasn't run out in a day.
I ran mine on a 3 day walk and got 20 hours of use from the rechargable li-pol. The unit was set to minimise consumption - 4 second update, screen off after 15 secs of no use, backlight at 40% etc. I think this probably agrees with lost Sheep's figures as the rechargable is quoted at 2700mAh - much the same as AA lithiums.
I am now seting up to use a sunlinq solar panel to supply / recharge the unit en route. Initially, I tried feeding the supply through the cigar lighter converter but this wasn't too successful - in cloudy conditions, the solar panel generates about 8-10 volts which doesn't seem to be enough for the converter to supply the 5 volts necessary on the usb port. Now I am making up my own high efficiency power supply to generate 5 volts directly to feed the unit.
