You might have seen us post something on the new Garmin GPS solution for the OQO model 02. It’s a great concept and we’ve had the opportunity of reviewing it recently. If you buy the whole package, which is the car mount for the actual OQO and the Garmin USB GPS device, you’d have what we have. While it’s nice in theory, you can see from the above video what sort of trouble we ran into. If you totally want to skip the video, these are our issues with the package:
- To get an initial satellite lock took around 20 minutes. Open sky, clear and sunny day
- The mount for the OQO covers the speakers so you can’t hear didly squat from the GPS software
- When trying to enter an address, it actually made us write in the city, street name, and street number with the friggin’ pen! (Yes, as we later found out you can use the hardware keyboard, but there should totally be a huge on-screen keyboard)
- The suction cups that comes with the GPS unit totally suck. Actually, they don’t suck. They fall off everywhere
- This isn’t a fault of the GPS unit or the OQO really, but since the device has an active touch screen, you can’t use your fingers at all to tap different menu items. This is a royal pain in the ass since you either have to use the included tablet pen, or fiddle around with the trackstick mouse.
- This is quite possibly the hardest setup to use while driving. We know, you shouldn’t use it while driving, but let’s be honest, are you really pulling over to the shoulder to enter in an address?
Has anyone out there given this a go? We want to like it, we do, but practically, we don’t think this works.Â
