Archive: Business & Technology

Half way to Florida we named our GPS 'Dolores.'  Sir Lancelot's castle was named Dolorous Gard, 'dolorous' meaning sorrow, grief, and pain.  Bob Hope's wife's name was Dolores.  He was joyful so I imagine she was, too.  As it turned out the Insignia NAV01 is a little of both.

Still, that may be better than expected for this low-end GPS unit.  Actually it was the Best Buy guy that suggested the Insignia, which is Best Buy's store brand.  I just wanted something cheap.  Two things attracted me to it.  One was that it was $79.99, $20 cheaper than the next cheapest unit, a TomTom.  Evidently it was on sale for the holidays, because it costs more today (but so does the TomTom).  The other was that it has a 4.3" screen versus the TomTom's 3.5" screen.

Cheap means fewer features and choices, but I didn't care about that.  Dolores has a female voice that we could understand most of the time, and she gives plenty of warning when she can.  If you go off route she instantly recalculates the route and doesn't harangue you about taking a wrong turn like an old GPS program I used years ago on a PDA did.  The map is clear and the touch screen is well designed to enter destinations with as few screen-taps as possible to maximize looking at the road and minimize looking at Dolores.

The mount is plastic with a big suction cup.  My little car doesn't have many places to put something like this, but the suction cup held on all the way to Florida and back.  Then it fell off a few days after we returned.  I'm trying to figure out a good location to glue it to.  I think if there were more smooth surfaces in my car it would be better.

The screen lets you pan in and out, and I found this useful when I wanted to get an idea of where Dolores thought she wanted us to go, because she and I didn't always agree on the route.  For example, coming home from Route 81 she insisted that we should go via Cortland, while I thought a route through Marathon and Dryden would be shorter and faster.  Around Scranton she took us off of Route 81 onto a toll road.  I guess it was probably shorter and avoided that often miserable Scranton traffic, but we weren't expecting a toll road and we have very little change with us.  That little adventure sent us scrambling to scrounge up 65 cents twice at booths with no attendants.  Coming home I ignored her instruction to leave 81, and as a bonus traffic wasn't so bad.

There were some down sides.  Dolores froze a couple of times in Florida (not any of the other states -- I don't know why), and had to be rebooted.  That meant turning her off, then back on, and reentering the route.  Not a big deal or hard to do, but if we had been near a turn we probably would have missed it.

We planned to stop in Washington on our last day, and I had reserved a hotel room in Alexandria.  That should have meant taking 95 north until we got to Alexandria, about two and a half hours away when I checked.  But Dolores couldn't figure out Alexandria for the life of her -- she wanted us to go west to Route 81, then go north,and then east to end up someplace north of Washington.  And going to the wrong place was going to take more than five hours.  It was lucky the hotel Web site had directions!

She did OK with what I considered the real test, city driving.  Sort of.  We were parked in an underground garage near the White House.  It should have been a fairly straight shot out of town going west on K street, then taking the beltway to where we could catch I83 to Harrisburg.  But Dolores takes her time acquiring a satellite signal, and when she did she didn't like this route.  She insisted on taking us a different way, and because I didn't trust my knowledge of downtown Washington I decided to follow her instructions.

That was a big mistake at first, because she'd send us down some street and then lose the signal.  By the time she got it back we were well off the route she had intended, and then the same thing happened three times.   Finally she got her bearings, and took us along all kinds of streets.  I was so turned around by this time that I had no idea where we were except I was pretty sure we were still in the north part of the city.  I noticed most of the license plates around me were from Maryland, so I figured she was on the right track.

Now, even if I missed a turn Dolores found the next good way to go immediately, and she got us to where we had to go.  I wanted to blame Washington traffic on her by this point, and I still think we'd have seen a lot less of it if we'd gone my way instead of hers.

But that's the thing about GPSs.  Sometimes looking at a map is a better idea because we humans still think better than computers.  Dolores did the best with what she had.  A friend with a Garmin GPS complains that his picks crazy routes to the point where he doesn't trust it any more.  And Garmin is the top of the line.  I do think it's fair to say that Dolores did better on highway navigation than city driving.

The unit comes with a 2GB SD card, and Insignia says they will have map upgrades that are downloadable (I assume for a price) onto this card.  It also has a battery that is good for a couple of hours.  That meant we could stop for a meal leaving her on so we wouldn't have to wait for her to find the satellite again before resuming our drive.

As they say, you get what you pay for.  With that in mind I am pretty happy with Dolores.  For my modest navigation needs she does what I need her to, and when she can't I still know how to read a map.  I think if I had to drive a lot in cities I'd go for a higher priced unit that finds the satellite faster and more reliably.  Minor gripe:  the zoom buttons are slightly too small, so instead of zooming sometimes the GPS went into pan mode.  And the compass direction indicator could be a little bigger to make it easier to read.  But for what I paid that bigger screen is wonderful, and let's face it: the bottom line is that we got to Florida and we got home.

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