Once bitten, triple shy
Last Friday, I went to my favourite GSP shop in order to find a (hopefully final) solution for my car GPS unit debacle.
As said in a previous blog, it’s the second unit that goes dead in as many weeks. The first one died on the eve of my holiday. A screen with ‘loading maps’ was the only thing that it wanted to share with me. The second one had the same phenomena but at the end of my holiday. Luckily it didn’t happy during my journey. But as mentioned in my previous blog, I had a paper version of my route with me as backup. This so to speak top model – as in not cheap – couldn’t convince me at all and I’m not talking about the reliability only. The interface of the 865T is as Spartan as the Streetpilot 310, 320 and 330 I owned the past years – and that is ages ago in terms of GPSr history.
The prove of the pudding comes with the 765T I own now. It has a much smoother interface and features which the 865T doesn’t have. Ecoroute is on of them but the most important one is Flemish TTS. Why’s that, you’d say. Isn’t the Dutch TTS good enough? It’s not only about the way of pronunciation like the tomato/potato quip between US and UK English. We have other meanings of words. The classic example is that we Flemish say to walk to somewhere whilst the Dutch say run. We use the word run as we refer to the sport when the Dutch say run fast/hard or race. In driving instruction this comes to different terms for turning off. This seems niggling to some and most GPSr manufacturer ignore this and generalize both as one language zone and take Dutch (with more users) as default. So it’s a great relief to see that we finally have Flemish TTS. And that on a device that should be inferior to the 865T. As far as I know, it has only voice control – which I don’t use, since it looks silly to talk to a machine that doesn’t seem to understand my jabbering – and POIs on screen – the main reason why I bought it for – which doesn’t seem to work properly. No, the 765T is certainly worth more it’s money. The future will tell if I’m right or not. For the moment I’m happy. And that’s also thanks to the quick intervention of Pieter of GPScenter which made that I had to miss a GPSr only for a couple of days.
Sure, his shop is not close home, but the trip of 150 – 200 km is compensated by the geocaches I’ve picked up whilst being there. Two of them are caches I couldn’t find on my first attempt. But that is entirely to blame to my superficial search:
The others could be completed within my first attempt and without too many problems:
- PITSTOP GROOT – BIJGAARDEN N°2 GC1VBHC
- De fiets- en voetgangersbrug. GC1Q6NR
- slag op het beverhoutsveld GCZ795
- Kleine meisjes # 2 : Luna GCRGP8
