NaviGadget

E-Ten G500 reviewed

Apr 18, 2006 gps navigation, reviews

We announced the G500 t back in January. There’ve been multiple reviews out but we waited for this one.

GPS

Good news: the G500’s SiRF Star III GPS is excellent. The bad news is that you’ll need to buy GPS software, just as with the US version of the HP iPAQ 6515. Out of the box, there’s nothing you can do with the GPS, so get that software pronto or use software from your old PPC GPS.

The G500 uses the latest SiRF III GPS chipset which offers significant improvements over last generation chipsets. The major features that this chipset provides are high sensitivity, lower power consumption and fast time to fix. In fact, the SiRF III chipset has been re-architected to have the equivalent to more than 200K correlators as opposed to the old sequential search process that contains only a few hundred to a few thousand correlators. The result is your GPS receiver becomes much more sensitive and can get a good signal even under dense foliage, downtown high-rise buildings and indoors in many cases which was not achievable with past generations of GPS receivers. With SiRF III your GPS has a faster time to fix, especially time to first fix (TTFF) speed. The GPS also has SBA support that includes both WAAS stations in the US and EGNOS stations in Europe.

We installed CoPilot 6 software for our GPS tests. The first time you launch the CoPilot software on the E-TEN, the navigation software will automatically search for GPS receiver and its com port (COM4 on the G500). CoPilot took a few seconds to find the built-in receiver and assign a com port. You can now go to the GPS screen in CoPilot to work with the receiver. The E-TEN’s GPS receiver took about 12 seconds to get a 3D fix in a cold start, and only a few seconds for warm/hot start. That’s quite fast. The receiver tracks 7-9 satellites and pulls strong signals from 4 satellites which are required for a 3D fix.

complete review