The Garmin 496...a teenager's review

On 2007-07-06, NW_Pilot wrote:
and knock them off for only a few hundred dollars? Hell I could crack/dump
their their os in a few days and would give me an excuse to get my SMT
rework / device programming equipment out of the attic.

If you want to make a better GPS, Sparkfun Electronics sells all the
parts with handy breakout boards for prototyping. An ARM7 based mcu
should have enough power and even in quantites of 1 is around $10 or so.

--
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
oups.com...
The Xbox 360 has sold badly. Less have been sold than even MS expected

That may be the case, but they've still sold millions of the damned
things, and they are EVERYWHERE. Walk into any gamer hangout or
computer store in America, and half the store will be X-Box console
games. The other half will be Playstation and Wii (which, although up
and coming, still hasn't displaced the Big Two), with a tiny little
corner devoted to PC games.

If only Garmin sold 3% as much as the "failed" X-Box, maybe they'd
install a decent processor in the 496.

And if those gamers would learn to fly, instead of playing MSFS like our
dear MX, then Garmin COULD sell millions of units.

Sheesh!

"James Robinson" wrote in message
. ..
Jay Honeck wrote:

The Xbox 360 has sold badly. Less have been sold than even MS expected

That may be the case, but they've still sold millions of the damned
things, and they are EVERYWHERE. Walk into any gamer hangout or
computer store in America, and half the store will be X-Box console
games. The other half will be Playstation and Wii (which, although up
and coming, still hasn't displaced the Big Two), with a tiny little
corner devoted to PC games.

Sales figures of the boxes themselves are somewhat different:

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_6331086

"In the first five months of the year, Nintendo has walked away as the
winner, selling 1.73 million Wiis in the United States, according to
market
researcher NPD Group. Microsoft has sold 1 million Xbox 360s and Sony has
sold only 665,000 PS3s."

And we wonder why the young (yuths) are not interested in flying?


--
Matt Barrow
Performance Homes, LLC.
Cheyenne, WY

Kyle Boatright wrote:

I think I spoke too soon. Another review of Lowrances product line
doesn't show any XM products. It was Garmin's marine line that had
XM.
Sorry for the tease!


I did the same thing but I know I was on the Lowrence site and I know I saw
a marine unit with XM weather. Looking back now I can't find it. That is
just strange.

On Mon, 09 Jul 2007 04:27:48 -0400, Bob Noel wrote:

However, users generally don't
have any objective quantitative measures for assessing which features are
more useful or for comparing different capability implementations.

Also, remember that "users" in a different context are "witnesses".
Considering how reliable these are should provide some hint as to why some
expertise is required to evaluation the collective of "opinions".

- Andrew

("Kyle Boatright" wrote)
As someone who was presumably taught the English language at an early
age.. "you're"... (??)

Glass houses and all that.


Well now you ARE in Jay's wheelhouse (pilothouse). You know with that
English major of his and whatnot.


Paul-Mont ....and all that jazz

(wheelhouse: from Dictionary.com)

Danish: styrehus
Dutch: stuurhut

Estonian: kaptenisild

Finnish: ohjaushytti
French: timonerie

German: das Ruderhaus
Greek: t?µ?????a

Hungarian: kormányosfülke

Icelandic: stÿrishús
Indonesian: ruang kemudi
Italian: timoniera

Latvian: sturesmaja
Lithuanian: vairininko kabina

Polish: sterówka
Portuguese (Brazil): cabine de navegação
Portuguese (Portugal): casa do leme

Romanian: timonerie
Russian: ??????? ?????

Slovak: kormidelníkova kabína
Slovenian: kabina s krmilom
Spanish: timonera, caseta del timón, puente de mando
Swedish: styrhytt

Turkish: dümen mahalli

My spell checker is smoking....

The closest comparable consumer products with equivalent engineering
requirements that comes to my mind is the just-released iPhone and
notebook/tablet computers.

Hell, forget Iphone, pick any mobile phone released in the last 5
years, they're all running 120-400 mhz Arm Chips, which any decent
programmer worth their salt should be able to make sing.

I'm a mobile software engineer... And I can assure you that what you
guys are seeing is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what
these boards are capable of- hell, we give our mainline game
programmers three days to do the menus of their games, and the stuff
they come up with wipes the floor with what I've seen from most
handheld avionics. To me it just smacks of pure lack of will, they
take the basic, designed-in-one-hour engineering interface and pass it
off as a consumer product because they know they can.

Ok, as a 25 year old "Senior" Mobile Framework engineer with a dozen
mobile games under my belt and an 200mhz ARM reference board I play
around with at work, not to mention 2 years experience with GPS and
Location services, I think I know something about this.

And Jay is right on the money... seriously.

Given capability of the hardware and the maturity of the embedded
platforms at this point, the current crop of avionics (handheld and
otherwise) isn't just substandard, its a downright embarrassment, and
it smacks of _ZERO_ effort on the part of the current producers.

I think you all underestimate the extent to which aviation has
completely fallen off the radar of the younger generation. There is
the sense that it is a dying market, and as a dying market, its not
worth investing in, so the fact that a trivial investment is all
that's needed to break into it doesn't matter. The young tech-dork
generation is all chasing after youTube and Google and social
networking and 'the next big thing'. That's how they'll (we'll) make
our cool hundred million and join the ranks of the Sillicon Valley
elite. A small side business in a 'dying' industry simply isn't what
they're watching.

BTW, the reason I have that embedded board is because of this very
topic... Although I was focusing more on PMA instrumentation
replacement, not handheld GPS's.

On Jul 7, 12:18 am, "NW_Pilot"
wrote:
"Jay Honeck" wrote in message

oups.com...



Now that my son is taking flight lessons, I'm letting him fly in
(Read: Mary is relinquishing) the front seat more often. This plants
him squarely in front of our panel-docked Garmin 496, the latest-and-
greatest portable GPS from Garmin.

We've flown behind this unit since OSH '06, and he has heard us
discussing its quirks and limitations, but he's never had any first-
hand experience programming it. Remember, the boy is 16 years old,
and has almost literally grown up with a Playstation/X-Box/PC game
controller in his hands. His thumbs are highly over-developed, from
10 million hours of video-game playing, and he is turning into an
absolute whiz with computers.

In short, he is an expert on all things that use graphics.

After working the 496 for a few flights, with all of its bizarre
hiccups (I.E.: The screen completely disappears when you slew the
cursor across the screen) and horrible graphics (displayed on a
postage-stamp-sized screen), his priceless comment was:

"If Microsoft built the X-Box the way Garmin built the 496, they'd
have sold about five of them..."

And you know what? He's absolutely right. We pilots were so
desperate for in-cockpit weather that we willingly paid $3000 (!) for
a $250 dollar unit that performs worse than a video game.

BTW: If you've never played with an X-Box, or a Sony Playstation game
platform, this post won't make any sense to you -- which is precisely
what Garmin was counting on. Go out and borrow your kids (or grand-
kids) game unit for a couple of hours, and see what REAL graphics
capability looks like. (And if you want to see how hand-held
graphical displays *should* perform, borrow their PSP handheld
Playstation unit.)

I sure hope Garmin steps up to the plate, performance-wise, with their
(much anticipated) new product at OSH...
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Hummmm.... I think I said something like this in the 596 thread that a
Korean knock off would be faster and better quality hahahahaha... Garmin is
banking on a Name not quality. Some say they are the leader in GPS
technology they may be but they will fail if they keep using poor quality
parts and 5+ year old technology in their displays. I can hand solder SMT
devices better then what they do on the inside of their devices.

The CPU speed in my cell phone is faster then that of the G1000 no telling
what they are using in the 496. So anyone have about $90K they want to toss
to the Korea/HongKong to reverse engineer the 496 and then make it better
and knock them off for only a few hundred dollars? Hell I could crack/dump
their their os in a few days and would give me an excuse to get my SMT
rework / device programming equipment out of the attic.

I'm in...

I'm a mobile software engineer... And I can assure you that what you
guys are seeing is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what
these boards are capable of- hell, we give our mainline game
programmers three days to do the menus of their games, and the stuff
they come up with wipes the floor with what I've seen from most
handheld avionics. To me it just smacks of pure lack of will, they
take the basic, designed-in-one-hour engineering interface and pass it
off as a consumer product because they know they can.

THANK YOU! I'm glad my son and I aren't the only ones who see this.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"