Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've only owned the 505 for about a week now. It's a great deal when you consider you get a functional GPS with software for all of the US and Canada and Pocket PC all in one unit. The beauty of the Pocket PC over a normal GPS is that you have great flexibility in the GPS software you use with it - and thus a competitive market - in addition to having all of the other advantages of a Pocket PC (MP3 player, multimedia, Outlook, Word, etc).
The 505 came packed with some nice extras: a flexible, suction cup car holder, a car charger, a 120v power supply and a mini USB cord. It uses the mini USB access port for both charging and information transfer(you can set an option on the Pocket PC to charge the unit directly from the computer).
The unit itself seems to be very well built and has a removable battery. Battery life seems good so far. The only PPC I've owned in the past was a source of frustration for me in that everytime it was reset or the battery ran out it would lose all of its memory. This unit appears to have internal flash RAM as well as flash ROM so it retains its memory even when its reset although it does lose its connection with whatever it was pulling from the SD card (the battery has yet to run out on me so I can't vouch for that). I've seen some reports that the unit is waterproof but I don't see how that could be considering all of the potential places water could get in. The screen is nice sized and can be viewed in either landscape or portrait with the push of a button. The GPS (based on the much vaunted Sirfstar III chip) consistently picks up the signal quickly and even indoors depending on where you're at (maybe not so much in the basement).
The software: Ostia 7.5. I've read a lot of complaints about the Ostia software and was wondering if I'd have to replace it on buying the unit. One should draw a distinction between problems with the software and the data. So far the software has been pretty flawless (it hasn't frozen up much at all but don't forget that you're also dealing with Windows Mobile) and the data has been spot-on. The software has a lot of options for adjustments (two different 3D views and one overhead view, zoom in and out, etc). I think the data may be dependent on where its collected. So far I've used it in the Seattle and Vancouver BC areas and found it to be very accurate (the Point of Interest data in BC was much more limited than in Seattle). A couple of suggestions I would have for the software: a record of distance traveled and an address search capability that could be begun from a user selected portion of the address. Example: I had 3 different map segments open that covered ground from Olympia, WA to Southern BC (an area of approximately 30,000 square miles and 7-9 million people) and was only able to search for an address using this format: house #, street, city. My search for "7th Ave" timed out the system because there were so many 7th Avenues in so many towns to contemplate. When I closed all but one of the 3 mapsand conducted the search I was able to find my target almost instantly. Had I been able to search by city first I could have left all of my maps open.
All in all, it seems to have been a very good choice. I'll let you know if my initial impressions are confirmed later on.
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