Paging the spack-navisti

Aldi have got a spacknav in.

http://www.medion.de/ms/aldi/md96920/uk/flash.html

It's £150 quid, has Trafficmaster, camera locations, maps for what looks
like most of western europe etc. Good value or an oddball piece of shite?

 

In particular, has anyone got any idea how I'd go about updating the camera
database?

 

http://www.pocketgpsworld.com

You can get camera updates for just about every system on there.

Most Medion units are Windows Mobile based which makes it easy.

 

That's the sort of thing I'm wondering about. No good having an all singing
all dancing thing for feck all if you can't update it or it fucks up.

Kinhell. I'm not looking to spend anywhere near that kind of money. It only
needs to work in a car - I often have to go to out of the way places for
work. £150 would be about the limit.

 

My brother bought an old medion from a twat at work for £20 because "I
can't get this piece of crap to work". 10 minutes after he got home he
plotted his first route and drove it to make sure it worked.

So, maybe not totally crap, but maybe not totally upto date, and maybe
not the easiest to operate, but it does actually appear to work.

 

If you're ok spending £150 on a Sat Nav to be fair, you may as well just get
one of the big name ones, as frankly (and not just snobbery) they are better
IME. The software is better, they don't crash, better screens etc etc. I
have a Tom Tom One XL Europe - I think it was about that price, it has speed
cameras on from PocketGPSWorld, and maps of UK and Europe. Seems to do
everything you want from a Nav, except I can't look back at stats of the
journey like max speed and stuff after I'm done. Which is of course quite
irrelevent, but sometimes would be mildly amusing heh. Unless I can do it
and I just haven't found the option - which is of course of a possibility.

 

I'm fairly sure that if you update the firmware to the latest version, it
has a tracking type thing in it... hold on....
...
....

Yes it does. There's a statistics option now. It does average speed,
distance, max speed and how long it's been on the move. Mine is a TomTom
Rider 1.

 

Ah cheers for the tip, I'll look into that then

 

I'm quite tempted to have something that just works. I've got enough things
that need a bit of tinkering. OTOH that is fucking cheap and I'd not be
heartbroken if it got nicked. How much meddling is required to make it run
tomtom? Are Sat navs now basically PDAs with a GPS device inside?

 

That's what I'm beginning to think. The big extra over other £150 sat navs
seems to be EU mapping, but I know that sometimes gets bundled for free with
sat navs.

 

but but you can a "proper" one for less

http://www.dixons.co.uk/product.php?sku=043233&camp_id

or

http://tinyurl.com/63norl

--
Steve Parry
BMW R45
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07 K1200GT SE
95 BMW F650
87 Yamaha FS1
Sukida SK90PY
91 Kawasaki AR50
07 VW Passat SE Estate for comfort
www.gwynfryn.co.uk

 

Hardly any, just install tomtom onto the SD card and you're away.
Or even easier, take advantage of my Tomtom installation services and send
me an SD card with a stabbed undressed antelope and I'll send it back
crammed with GPS software
My £50 navigo from ebuyer has Tomtom, Miomap and Turbodog on there (after
installing at home) and it's cheap enough to leave in the Locost with no
roof without worrying.

Yes, mine is basically a PDA with a built-in GPS receiver.

 

Excellenté, as they say on the Ferrero Rocher adverts.

I don't know what any of that stuff is, bar Tomtom. Is it possible to get
tom tom traffic on these things? Do they generally work well (ie, as well as
it would on a proper tom tom)?

 

As I say, my Tom Tom has Europe maps, and I'm sure it was about that price.
And there is the added benefit of the support and accessories you can get
which, speaking from experience of Medion laptops, can be a real arse with
Medion stuff.

 

They're just 3 different sat-nav programs.
No tomtom traffic, and as the new Tomtom 7 doesn't run on windows, you can
only use TT6, it's all up to date though, speed cameras etc.

As TT6 is a couple of years old, hardware has caught up with the software
and it runs great, much quicker than my PDA/bluetooth GPS combe I was using
before my PDA took a nosedive onto a concrete floor

 

<Snip>

Below is a c&p account of my recent trip, sent to colleagues. Cue one
dimbo taxi driver and a non-functioning satnav.

Starts/
I've been accompanied by a nice lady name of Karin from ChileAlimentos,
and The Taxi Driver From The Dark Side who's our ferryman for the week.

The first thing he asked me when he picked me up was whether I had a
satnav device. Odd request from a cabbie, but as it happens, I have one
on my phone, so I fired it up and unsurprisingly, it showed I was in
Chile.

"Se vende?" he asked hopefully. "Is it for sale?"

"Er, no." (Has anyone else ever had a cabbie offer to buy their phone?
It's a first for me)

So off we went, collected Karin, and set out on the first day of our
last three days, so far, of travelling.

We have been in a Nissan that belongs in a museum. Oh, it goes, but it
is, shall we say, a little bit tired. And our driver doesn't have any
maps. Instead, he is relying on the smallest, crappiest little hand-held
satnav device you've ever seen. Imagine something made by Nintendo,
trying to receive a position fix from Sputnik One, powered by a single
AAA battery, and connecting via an old-fashioned Morse key, and you'll
get an idea of its usefulness.

So we have been getting lost. Regularly, frequently, and with great
originality. How the hell you can get lost in a country where there are
basically only two directions - North and South (and only one road that
goes north-south) - is a mystery to Karin and myself, but he's managed
it every day, several times a day, bless him. However, we have always
made our destination in the end, if occasionally late.

His finest moment yesterday was reversing up the Pan American motorway
because he'd missed the exit. I never knew big trucks could swerve like
that. But today he excelled himself.

Yesterday, poor Karin left her wedding rings in the pocket of her white
coat (jewellery and watches off for factory visits, but my ring will not
shift these days so I'm OK). She was upset, but called the factory this
morning, and yay! They had them! So we raced round our appointments
today to stop off at the factory concerned on our way back. Luckily it
was on our route. Well, as I intimated, you only go North or South in
Chile. Go West, and there's a chilly splash as you fall into the
Pacific, and go East and you bump into the Andes.

And he got lost again. Amazing. The factory was right beside the
motorway, on the other side, and he missed the exit again. So he parked
on the edge of the motorway and got out of the car to cross six lanes of
crazed high-speed traffic.

Anyone else remember that old video game, Frogger? Where you had to hop
a frog from lily pad to lily pad to get it across a river? it was like
that. I said to Karin, as we watched him skip nimbly between speeding
tanker trucks: "We're about to witness the death of a taxi driver."
Incredibly, he made it there and back.

Another problem is that he's a bit long-sighted, so he holds this
useless satnav out at arm's length as he regards it intently. It's a bit
like watching one of those chappies with a bad attack of religion at
some Catholic holy procession - you know, the one in front who's
carrying the brightly-painted statuette of the Virgin Mary, with a look
of combined faith, love and fear on his face. That's our cabbie and his
satnav. He reinforces the religious image by occasionally waving it
hopefully from side to side, in the manner of someone swinging a smoking
urn of incense. This would be all OK in itself, but with one hand on the
wheel, one hand thoughtfully waving his satnav, and his gaze fixed
firmly on it, not much attention is being paid to the road and oncoming
traffic.

The Wandering Driver From Hell apart, it's gone well. <snip work related
stuff>

 

As usual with cheapo sat-navs, the first thing to check is if you can
get map updates. If you can't get any, forgettaboutit.

 

Hang on. If these things run windows CE, could I use it as a PDA as well?

 

Yes, you need to change 2 lines in the registry so it boots into windows
instead of straight to the GPS program (using the USB cable) and then it's
basically a PDA I just followed the link/instructions on the ebuyer
comments page for the sat-nav.

 

http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=221799&doy=17m5

pikey price and lifetime camera updates