Review of the Sat Guide Moov Mio GPS - Not one for the road
SatGuide is one of the pioneers of the GPS market in India, making units available as early as 2005. But I never had an opportunity to evaluate their units until last week, when I took their Moov 200 on a trip to Amritsar and back.
To start with, I loved the build quality of the hardware — the plastic finish was nice, so was the brilliant car charger bundled with it. I also loved the windshield mount, it was not only small and just the right size, but also very well made. It was a pleasant surprise to find an AC to USB charger too.
But when I mounted the unit the time zone set was incorrect, so I had to correct this and other basic settings like the display format (2D v/s 3D and day or night). The display was sharp and bright but it seems their graphic designer doesn’t understand that brown fonts don’t work on blue and yellow backgrounds, they just end up hurting your eyes.
On the trip, I took my favourite GPS along too. While it took my GPS less than a minute to lock on Golden Temple, Amritsar, Moov took about three minutes. I don’t know why it asks the user if you want to use it as a video player, audio player, picture viewer or navigator when the last one is its primary function. But the interface was slightly better than what I have seen on other Windows CE devices, though the hardware felt under-powered while doing a search.
The two units showed a slight difference, about three kilometers, to the destination. It seemed each one had its own way of getting there within the city. With the distance at 481 km, the units showed that our ETA would be around 18:30 hours. But as we moved on, the ETA kept changing on both units. For some reason the moment we left Delhi, the Moov wanted me to take the old highway and not the new one. Even on selection of an alternate route, it pointed me towards the old route. At every turn it kept telling me how I could rejoin the old highway. Strangely, this stopped only about 100 km from my destination.
Once in Amritsar, we started looking for points of interest, like places to eat and landmarks, and the Moov failed miserably. Though SatGuide claims there have about two million points of interest, I was unable to find a single one and had to resort to the other GPS and local knowledge.
On our way back, the Moov wanted me to turn towards Chandigarh and then turn to Delhi, a 200-km detour. Back in Delhi, my home is next to a famous landmark, but sadly the Moov located the landmark about four km from my house.
Despite the problems, at Rs 13,990 the Moov 200 is a good buy if you are looking at city to city navigation. With the bad quality of road markings, half of them covered photographs of politicians and milestones that are not there, a GPS unit makes sense, but if you are looking to explore your city, the Moov might not be what you are looking for.
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The above review appeared in the Indian Express on Sunday 21 Feb, 2010
1 comments:
Dear Sir, A company like ours that has been a pioneer in GPS Navigation before others even figured out whether such products could exist in India is used to a lot of bouquets and some brickbats. Obviously this article falls in the latter category, and criticism that is fair is always welcome. So we respond with gratitude. We would like to bring to your notice the following points since we believe in offering more value at a better price than anyone else in the market, so readers should not be misled by some analysis which might have not seen the complete picture;
• SatGuide is an immensely popular product for intra city driving and navigating within the city. There are also numerous appreciations from people who went between important cities. Conclusion that the product is only suitable outside city limits is not something we are able to accept. Best would be to ask the thousands of customers who vouch for our product today and then pass judgement
• SatGuide would like to highlight that right at the beginning the author starts off with “took my favorite GPS along too”, well if you are reviewing a product I would just request that don’t start with a favorite kid in mind, see all products in a neutral view! So we hope that it had nothing to do with some negative points which kept creeping in
• Default is set as India timezone, the feedback regarding wrong timezone is being checked.
• About GPS fix time, GPS will take a little longer when it is in ‘cold GPS’ mode and poor quality devices take upto 20 minutes to catch on, our SatGuide Mio Moov200 comes with state of the art Sirfstar III chipset which is unparalled in the industry, so we are confident that it offers better value than any other favorite.
• The interface comfort is often subjective, some people like x others like y, and customers love the simple interface we offer. We will take this feedback and try to further improve upon it!
• This device has much higher RAM, Processor quality in its category & price, so the under powered bit is a little difficult to digest, maybe an objective assessment of comparing apples to apples at the same price point should be done by the writer.
• Regarding routing, there is always subjectivity anywhere in the world. Customers are told before giving the product that this is not to be used to tell you how to go to a place you know, a GPS Navigation device is always one to help you get to places you don’t normally go. After all, it cannot replace the human brain as it uses logical routing. But all feedback regarding routes will be checked carefully and attended to if there is any better solution.
• SatGuide’s innovative “Citizen Mapper Scheme” allows both customers and others to give feedback on the map data which is incorporated in the next release. This is a standard in all developed markets worldwide, even those which have close to perfect maps. For more details on how to become a Citizen Mapper visit www.satguide.in and we hope the publication will let us know which key POI in delhi was 4 kms away
• ETA keeps changing because it depends on your speed, as you increase speed the software assumes you will get there faster. This is a logic which is again explained in the user manual
• In Amritsar SatGuide has a couple of thousand points of interest, so not being able to find a single one could mean the menus were not clear, we hope the user went through the Quick Start Guide before beginning to use the device since each software has a different interface.
In summary, we would just request the publication concerned and the author to keep in mind that growing markets rely heavily on what initial reviews are, as the ‘early adopters’ in new technology products life cycle stage are easily swayed in their judgement. This can adversely affect the growth of the entire segment, so analysis needs to be fair, objective and after indepth research, not with a favorite in mind and without studying the user manual properly!
Regards
Amit Kishore Prasad
Founder, MD & CEO
SatNav Technologies
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