Still completely happy with it 12 months later

Category: Review on ASUS A636 MyPAL GPS

Posted by: 14-Jun-2007

Strengths: Solid, well built, good looking unit. Decent battery life (4 - 5 hours depending on screen brightness). Fold out GPS antenna for extra reception (usually not needed btw).

Weaknesses: Once cradled in-car (only way to charge the unit), you lose access to the headphone socket (ie: you can't wire-up to line-in on stereo).

I've had this unit for a year now. I still love it. I've seen my sister buy a Navman 40i and friends buy TomToms and Mio units and I still think the MyPal is a great unit.

The only thing that lets it down is vehicle access to the headphones/line-out socket whilst cradled in the car (ie: charging) and the fact that it runs Windows CE. CE is such an archaic system it brings back memories of my 386SX PC. I've got a 2GB SD card plugged into it which has over a 1GB free on it and yet I can't use Outlook as I'd like because it refuses to utilise the SD card for memory storage purposes! Media Player playlists are perplexing, confusing and irritating. I'll stop, as this isn't a review about M$ Windows Mobile 5.0

Because Co-Pilot has Bluetooth I figure I should be able to find a Bluetooth to line in adapter so that the Asus can access the stereo's line-in via bluetooth.

CoPilot works wonderfully. You wouldn't know it's sitting on a flakey OS. I've never got an error out of it or had it crash. Kudos to the programmers. I live in Hobart Australia and can't complain about TravRoute's coverage of my little city.

One thing I've got to say is that CoPilot - complete with Jessica (Australian female voice) - hardly ever asks you to perform a u-turn. This is in stark contrast to the Navman 40i. If you fail to stick to the path mapped out by CoPilot, it simply recalculates a new route that INCLUDES the road you are travelling on. The Navman 40i more often than not, once it eventually wakes up (which is usually after CoPilot has already found a new route), will immediately start chanting it's "make a u-turn" line. To get CoPilot to ask you to make a u-turn, you've pretty much got to go find a dead-end street to turn into.

In the 40i's favour on the other hand, is better map display in my opinion. Street names for streets you are passing are displayed much nicer than they are on CoPilot. I've had to scroll across 3 screens to find the name of a street. Whilst it's rare you'd want or need to know the names of the streets, I've just got to say I like the fact that the street names 'move' along the street so they can appear on the piece of map that's currently up on the display.

The unit still works as well as the day I bought it except for a slightly annoyingly lose stylus holder. I fixed this by a well placed strip of Sportstape on the stylus.

Because it's a PDA it means I can load software of my choosing on it. When I go walking I've found a program (Vitesse Limite v4.2) absolutely fantastic to record how far I walk as well as useful statistics about the walk (avg speed, etc). Bear in mind that this isn't the program's purpose, but it just happens to do it quite well. I've also downloaded OziExplorer, however, as I'm using the trial version, I don't have access to any maps, so I can't tell you too much about the software except that it works predominately well for bush walking (waypoints, etc).

Anywho... Thought I'd do the right thing and express my feelings about this lovely little device. All too often I forget to (unless it's annoyed me).