The other push for this purchase was my goal to enable super lightweight travel. I not only survived a week and a half trip this year with only a PocketPC and no laptop, I was immersed in a sea of almost a thousand other techies, almost every one lugging at least ten to fifteen cumulative pounds of computing iron, making me, in turn, feel like a flyweight having left the Sony at home and "roughing it" with only a PocketPC and it's accessories. Click here to learn what I learned from that experience and previous test trips.
In addition to having a dash mount in our cars, travel that includes
rent cars includes packing strips of double stick velcro that has held
the Picturebook in a convenient dash location in all but one rent car
that
I have come across to date. If you are shopping for a GPS
friendly
laptop, remember that they have limited keyboards that use a <Fn>
key
to convert keys such as the arrow keys to uses such as <PgUp>
<PgDn>
etc. On the C1X, the designers were sharp enough to understand
that
a mobile user might only have one hand available when a program such as
Street Atlas uses the <PgUp> etc keys for critical keyboard
shortcuts,
and they placed a second <Fn> key on the right side of the
keyboard
that makes these commands possible with a single hand... and it makes a
huge difference. If you have a laptop with this limit, give
consideration
to packing a numeric keypad to make it easier and safer to control the
display on the road.
The minimalist in me then migrated from the Tripmate/Laptop to the Magellan Meridian
"Yellow" which served me well for well over three years as my primary
GPS and now lives on riding the handlebar of my BMW. Using
handhelds for vehicle navigation is not for the faint of heart... the
tiny screen and bunched controls absolutely demand time to learn what
these incredible units can do in such a small package... for example, turn by turn routing using
Google Maps.
The Meridian was finally replaced in early 2007 by the Magellan
Explorist after a brief detour to the Meridian Color which turned out
to be painful to use in full sunlight, so it quickly went back to the
vendor. The Explorist 500 series was being closed out and when a
$200 combo package came up that included the CD version of
MapSendTopo3D USA, I bit and have been smiling ever since. The
transition from Meridian to Explorist turned out to be a much harder
task than I had anticipated, so, to help others, I cobbled together an Explorist transition
tips page to hopefully help others going down the same road.
This has a lot to do with the gps units "last position" If you fire it up within 25 miles of it's last used position, a fix is normally found pretty fast, under a minute or two by most units that store it after power down and run their own onboard clock, but if you take a flight from NY to LA, and fire it up in the rent car when you arrive, it's gonna be a while until it sorts out the sky.
All these units are going to have an initialization screen that will
allow the user to reset the current approximate position when you know
the unit is going to be lost, so work with the unit or software when
this
comes up and you will get the most utilization out of this great
technology.