Customer Reviews

Belkin F8T051 Belkin Bluetooth Gps

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been waiting to review this product.

In determining which GPS add-on to buy, you think about few factors: hardware, software and connectivity.

1. Hardware

a. Form - this receiver is tiny - at 1/3 size of your my ipaq 6315, it's easy to bring around for hiking, and for putting it on the car dashboard without having it sliding around.

b. Reception - I have a Garmin etrex Vista ($350 when I bought) -for hiking (and sometimes for driving though not suitable). My Garmin had to show the startup screen for 15-30sec switching on, before haivng to wait for ANOTHER 30-60sec to locate the satellites. This is really horrible when you're lost and looking for direction. The tiny Belkin takes less than 20 seconds from switch on to finding myself on the map in the ipaq - IMPRESSIVE! And when I switch off and on within the same minute (warm start), I can get my location within 5 seconds! The Garmin would have taken near to a minute!

2. Software

I've used the Hertz Neverlost system - which is user-friendly and accurate. Now, this one is almost as good! It's one of those case where the company has already written a good program and want to sell it for few more bucks after having it stripped down.

a. voice command - clear enough to hear using my ipaq speaker while driving. It prompts you at the right moment (some times so accurate it's scary). For example, it'd prompt you to keep left or right to prevent you from steering to the wrong lane on a highway. And this happens just about or before you see the overhead signs! When I exit a highway, there were some tricky spots where there are two small roads about 20-40 ft apart, and it will pass the first one before telling me to "turn right".

b. Input - One thing I may fault is the input process. As in most GPS, you need to type in City, followed by Street, and number. But in this case you have to key City, wait for it to search (about 10-30s), and then input the street (which takes a bit longer), and then the number. After which when you click "NAV" to find the route, it may take as long as 30s! This is rather time consuming, but considering many PocketPC mapping programs (e.g. MS Pocket Map) do not have routing feature, this is quite good.

c. Points of Interest (POI) - this program does not have many POI though. Tourist attractions are limited. But considering it's made for PPC, and there isn't much space for all these, I'm fine with it.

3. Connectivity between both (since we're talking about bluetooth).

a. considering you have wireless connection betw your ppc and the gps, it's really neat! And the connection once establish stays establish tightly. Transmission of signal is rather quick and as I mentioned earlier, I don't find too much lag in a way that would prevent me from getting on to the wrong road.

One trick though - always switch on/off your ipaq bluetooth before switching on/off the belkin receiver. Else, you may find your map freeze if you suddenly switch off your receiver.

Bonus:

The charging cable is neat with USB cable on one end, and comes with a cigarette lighter charger. So, the same cigarette lighter adapter can be used to charge my ipaq!

Overall, I'm very impressed, and I've found a significant good use of my ipaq (which is not only a phone/PDA, but also a GPS. The portability of this combination means I can move from cars to cars (without having a fixed in-car installation), and yet enjoy reasonably good direction/routing capability! I've tried driving with a laptop connected to GPS receiver, but that's extremely cumbersome compared to this!

ALthough the ipaq PPC screen is small, i find the voice command sufficient, and only at times take it up to view it.

Finally, I bought this for $149 at buy.com. I tried buying from Provantage but the item was lost in shipping and after two months, they've still not refund me the money although they've agreed to - customer service is horrible at Provantage!

Hope this helps!

All I have to say that this is one of my best investments.

I use a compaq 4150 with the belkin. It can create routes, is precise to the exact intersection, tells the speed etc. It can recalculate routes, if you change your course.

In BC, we got places faster than the locals.

My wife played with it and got it. She has a hard time getting used to my toys, she liked it so much she went throught each item and learned it.

Things to watch out for. your ipaq, or dell axim. from time to time might not detect Blue tooth devices. You can just reset it. A good way to avoid problems is to exit the software and the stop bluetooth.

Please also buy some velrow circle to attach to your dash.

You might want to also buy atleast a 128MB storage card for saving the maps. I have a 256 MB, so now I never have to download maps.

One huge caveat -- You might have to buy this toy to your significant other

I tried the workaround described in the other review on this product and it did not work. I loaded the map in landscape and switched back to portrait. The GPS still did not work. This product is simply not supported for Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 second edition.

This device tracks my location pretty well. Outside and in the car with cloud cover it was dead on. In my apartment window it was off by a block. The fit of the plastic battery cover isn't quite perfect, but adequate. The CD doesn't seem to have the manual and I needed to go to the company web site to see how to convert from ST to XT mode (hint: you need a pin). The included software has maps for both the US and Canada which is good since I spend most of my time in Washington and British Columbia. It gives directions as good as you can get without taking traffic congestion into account, but it does offer some route generation preferences. The map shows only the street. I was hoping for some better indication of the terrain--i.e. blue for water and some other color for land.

I bought it not really knowing if it would work with third party programs because there isn't a whole lot of information out there about these Bluetooth GPS units. Fortunately, it does work with the two I tried (Navio and GPSDash) using the NMEA protocol. This means I can get topo map scans (or satellite imagery, etc) and track my movements on those maps--which is the real reason I bought a GPS.

This was a very good unit and helped me a lot while it worked. But I left the unit on once in my car to compeletely drain the battery and now it won't work even after a complete recharge. The unit simply has stopped sending any GPS data to the PDA/laptop.

I would avoid it because it is only a matter of time before you will leave it on one day and that will be the end of it.

The software for the Belkin GPS unit is not compatible with Windows PC 2003 second edition. To load you must turn the screen on your PDA into Landscape mode, then generate and install your map. After it is loaded into PDA, you can turn screen into portrait mode and it will work. Belkin said they havn't updated their software yet and don't know when they will.

It isn't the easiest thing to get working sense I didn't feel like shelling out the $100 for belkin's software. But if you know enough about bluetooth-serial com ports and how to adjust the baud rate, then it's definately worth it.

The unit itself works well but the software and maps are way out of date. There was a recall of these units due to exploding batteries so Belkin stopped making them and never released any updates. I got a new one still in the package and the battery was swollen so much the cover wouldn't fit but it still works. They are selling replacement batteries on ebay but beware, they won't fit.

I've had used the Belkin F8T051 for over a year now and I very satisfied with it performance. I use it with Inav Iguidance navigation software on a T-mobile MDA and a notebook computer. everytime I use it this product I always get to my destination without much problem. If you drive in an area similar to downtown Boston you may experience brief signal lost every now and then but it usually last only a few second, other than that I love this product. And to the other user who had the problem where the signal was lost after the battery was drain. I have a solution for you; Just take the battery out of the for a minute or two and that should fix the problem. It worked for me.

I have very bad sense of directions and used to get lost often. No more, after I got this GPS and a PDA phone.

I am using Belkin GPS for last one year and it works great. The accuracy has been very good and the software is just lovely, though it doesn't have few roads which are recently built. Maybe it needs an update.

The problem previous reviewer had, can be rectified by taking the battery out and letting the gps discharge for some time. This problem occurs when you let the battery completely drain out when the gps is on. It happened to me once.

Overall, I am happy with the purchase.