In article 1120968814.beb91d06ff252e3408ac55cbbe854c5c@teran ews,
"Richard Kaplan" wrote:
It is quite a bit different. The 396 can be charged in advance and thus
does not require ship's power at all. There is a grand total of one
required cable for the 396 and that is the cable from the smart antenna to
the GPS. That is a complete non-issue in even an rental plane.

Well, a PDA/TabletPC and BT GPS can be charged in advance also,
requiring a grand total of zero cables. If I were to have an alternator
failure, continuation into or in close proximity to severe weather
wouldn't be of interest to me, so losing weather information wouldn't be
critical. Even so, there are simple work-around to relying on ship's
power. These problems aren't rocket science, and they don't require an
engineering degree to solve. For a truly portable system, there is no
doubt that the 396 is a winner over competing solutions.


I am going to avoid the remainder of your nit-picking by reiterating my
two main points, which may not have been super-obvious until now:

1--The 396 hasn't shipped yet, so no one knows how, or how well, it will
work.

2--We do know that the 396 has a small and rather unimpressive display
based on the specifications. Compared to a TabletPC or even a modern
PDA, I'm not sure how much of a weather picture you're going to get on a
3.7" display at QVGA resolution. When comparing it to WxWorx running on
a TabletPC, I'm not sure how good it's really going to be for those
folks looking for a primary weather display.



JKG