Well, if you read my first posts HERE then you know I bought a cheapo GPS for $18 on eBay. Today I put the thing through its paces and I thought I'd share it all with you. First of all, as a GPS, the silly thing works fantastic. Much better than my older GPS units. Much better than my old HP rx5915 or Ipaq 310. It is the "cat's meow!"
The thing came all the way from China, yet the native language on the device is in Russian. Not sure how that works out. I should clarify...actually the entire GPS in in English and that is all that normal user would ever see...but I'm not normal as most of you know. The actual ROM build of the CE device is in Russian as you will see from the pictures below.
The average user is pretty much locked out of the device. You can access all the GPS and bonus programs, but as far as adding additonal software...well forget it unless you are familiar with Windows CE to at least a basic extent. That is probably good as it keeps the average person from accidently turning the device into a brick...something that I have done on many occasions.
But for the inquisitive person, it is pretty easy to get around the device's limitations. By the way, when you plug the device into a serial port on your desktop, it is recognized by default as an external hard disk drive and you have access to all the files on the device that are stored on the micro-SD card...but not to any of the Windows CE OS areas.
Of couse since that is really decompressed on the fly during the boot process and is in RAM, anything you can access there is lost when you power down anyways. Except for the registry which is persistent...yay!
That's pretty neat Rich! How's the battery life on that thing? Any internet capabilities? What will it's primary function be? Just another toy? Either way, great job on the review/write-up. I find it interesting that you basically turned a GPS into a PDA.
Battery life stinks...I get about an hour and a half using it as an ebook reader without it being plugged in. Less than 40 minutes playing MP3 music through the FM transmitter.
Using a mini-->full size USB cable adapter, I was able to use my USR MaxG USB wifi stick with it and surf the web, but at 480 pixel width x 272 pixels tall...it is not fun at all, and that eats up more power than the FM transmitter does. And of course you have a cable hanging down and sticking out too. Plus it took the better part of two hours copying all the additional CE drivers I needed that were not included on the GPS.
The primary use will be in my car and boat as a GPS unit...and while I could use it for occasional entertainment I don't really see myself doing that as I have old pocketpcs and HPCs that I can throw in the glovebox for whatever....since I don't have one of those fancy Android cell phones.
I do wish that I had bought one that had the AV input jacks for an RCA video signal. I would have put a camera on the back bumper of my car so that I could use it as a rear view camera when I backed up to my trailers to align the trailer tongue with the ball. More than once I've overshot and bumped the trailer with the hitch and such putting small scratches on my car bumper.
Both of my cars, and my boat have good XM radios on them, so I don't really foresee myself even using the FM function really. But as far as a GPS goes, I've used the HP Navitech software for a long long time, and used the Garmin software for a good while too. This iGo is new to me, but I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is simple yet powerful and seems to run better than any of my older CE GPS software.
Being a newbie at these cheapo Chinese GPS devices, I've learned that flashing the thing is very easy, and very similar to flashing the firmware on a Via8500 or WM8650 netbook.
Just copy the software to the micro-SD card and insert it and wait. When you are done, pop it out and the OS and xip.nb0 file is reflashed along with the shell. And like the netbooks, you can customize the logo.bmp file to anything you prefer...which is what I did with mine...
I took a picture of the Earth from outer space, took a picture of a GPS satellite, merged them into a 480x272 pixel .bmp screen, added text...and viola!
And I just discovered that my device does have AV in...when I saw the small earphone type jack I thought it was for microphone or headphones...didn't realize it was AV in until I pulled the plastic protector sheet off the back and read the printing...now I'm getting happy. I need to order a small camera from eBay and give it a try and see if I can mount it on the back of my car..
