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.
Hope that minor epic post makes some sense
Posted: 18/03/2008 at 11:51
