Sat nav or not

[highlander]

Hey Graeme, have they built some more roads up there since General Monk left then?

Who??

[Doggy]

My bad! Wrong General.

General Wade, (knew he wuz English / 4-letter word).

[highlander]

I wasn't aware of either General.

Cheeky Doggy The roads in Scotland are pretty well kept, generally (those in Aberdeen City are definitely the exception...) - some really great driving to be had in these parts

[Doggy]

Yes, I know and love many of them, (family hail from Argyll). Never been to Aberdeen, but I've done the usual touristy bits of the Western Highlands & Islands, Inverness and so on down to Edinburgh, but for some reason never ventured east of the A9. Must do it someday.

[gumby6371]

Buy yourself a Nokia phone with GPS, free sat nav app available from nokia if it's not on your phone already, updates itself and it's (so far) proved very accurate. Spend another £2.50 on a phone holder from Tesco or some such place and you're away ! The cheap phone holder stays fixed to my windscreen, but unlike a sat nav holder doesn't tell the little tw*ts with hoodies you've got a couple of hundred quids worth of sat nav in the glove box !
My old sat nav has been gifted to the other half as the phone has been so good.

[FarmerPug]

my nokia n96 has nokia maps but i have never got it to work well, its too slow to use in the car, and google maps on the phone doesnt keep the backlight on. Im actually thinking of getting a htc desire, is it a good phone, is the battery life really as bad as the reviews say

[gumby6371]

Nokia maps on my E71 works very well, my only gripe is I still haven't found an option to stop the 'please observe the speed limit' warning

It may be an issue with the gps reciever, not sure if they would be model dependant on which type they fit.

[highlander]

The battery life on the Desire is fairly poor - I need to charge it every couple of days with GPS turned off - but to be fair, I use it as a BlueTooth streaming music player on my drive home from work every night.

It does fine as a music player for long stretches though - it played music over BlueTooth all the way from Aberdeen to Penrith earlier this year (we took a Centerparcs break in Whinfell Forest), and it lasts just fine on Aberdeen to Thurso trips.

I got an in-car charger for it for free when I got my contract (little bit of sweet-talking the nice lady from Phones4U). It's handy because it's a micro-USB connector, which is now supposed to be the standard connector for mobile phone chargers - so when my phone is fully charged, the Wifely Person can charge her phone (my old Blackberry Storm).

The HTC Desire itself is brilliant - really good screen, excellent touch-typing, there's loads of decent free apps, it'll play MP3s and you can get it to sync with your iTunes or Windows Media Player pretty easily, you can put in a really big MicroSD card for extra storage, and the built-in camera is really great quality (video is good too).

[FarmerPug]

if the battery life on the htc is poor because it needs charged every few days the n96 is absolutely discraseful, im lucky if i can get a day from my phone, its so bad it can leave me with no phone, unless i carry a spare battery

[highlander]

The battery life is certainly a bit worse than the Blackberry Storm, but the HTC Desire is powered by a 1 GHz processor (Qualcomm Snapdragon), and the screen has both a higher resolution and a brighter backlight.

It's a damned good phone, and I'm sure you wouldn't be disappointed with it. Definitely comparable to the iPhone in terms of functionality and looks, and just as good at mobile e-mail/social networking as the Blackberry. And the latest release of Android features Flash capability, you won't get that on an iPhone.

[DaiRees]

I've got the HTC HD2 running windows mobile, and I love it! Bought a windows phone specifically because I used to carry a phone and a PDA, now I only need the one device. Very happy with it, the only minor niggles I've had have been related to the windows software which can be a bit flakey. The phone itself is awesome, great camera, great media player, excellent GPS (I've got tom tom and google maps on it) and it can stream google maps over the data connection quick enough to keep up with me pretty well at 70MPH . The other feature I love is the built in wi-fi router which works really well and has enabled me to throw away my old mobile broadband dongle, so it's working out considerably cheaper than I was paying before . Hell, it even makes phone calls

Battery life is pretty poor though , you can easily run it out over the course of a busy day. It now lives at night on a charger stand and If I use it in the car for GPS or music etc I always plug it into the charger.

[Welly]

I've got the HTC HD2 running windows mobile, and I love it! Bought a windows phone specifically because I used to carry a phone and a PDA, now I only need the one device. Very happy with it, the only minor niggles I've had have been related to the windows software which can be a bit flakey. The phone itself is awesome, great camera, great media player, excellent GPS (I've got tom tom and google maps on it) and it can stream google maps over the data connection quick enough to keep up with me pretty well at 70MPH . The other feature I love is the built in wi-fi router which works really well and has enabled me to throw away my old mobile broadband dongle, so it's working out considerably cheaper than I was paying before . Hell, it even makes phone calls

Battery life is pretty poor though , you can easily run it out over the course of a busy day. It now lives at night on a charger stand and If I use it in the car for GPS or music etc I always plug it into the charger.

*Reads the above and understands the following words and their meanings;*.

Battery

Phone

Charger Stand


All the other stuff may as well be written in Japanese

[Doggy]

Equally confuzzled here, though on balance, Dai's post was marginally more intelligible than Graeme's

Sounds like there's a whole world of gadgetty gizmo-ishness out there to confuse us old-uns.
(Still I've got an excuse, but Welly's a mere youngster)

[Welly]

I know, for some reason I have no interest in gadgets and fancy TV's etc - probably because any previous experience of these things sees them later unused, broken, worthless, replaced-by-a-better-one and it all seems a waste of time and money. I've still got one of those big f*ck-off TV's with the enormous back end (for the 'tube' thing) in our lounge

Actually, still wondering what to do with 5 TV's at home ill-equiped for the digi change over

[DaiRees]

speaking of which, I'm just considering a 55" led tv.