Looking for after Market navigation system
04-12-2004, 01:49 PM
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Looking for after Market navigation system
Hey you guys, I want to upgrade and buy a navigation system for my A6. I have the 98 model with the red lights all over the place and therefore, i want to keep the factory radio. Does anybody know of a "GOOD" navigation system I can by that uses DVD based and has it's on screen with it.
Also, does anyone have any good ideas where I could mount the screen so that it looks really nice.
Also, does anyone have any good ideas where I could mount the screen so that it looks really nice.
04-12-2004, 03:38 PM
#3
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I just bought a garmin ique 3600 portable gps/pda, it works great and it came with a free holder tha
t charges the gps/pda while using in the car and for about 1/4 the cost and headache of installing one. usually other stores will charge you $50-80 for the in-car holder. again costco.com sells it for $499.00 great deal.
GARMIN iQue 3600 Palm OS 5 PDA w/Built-in GPS
$499.99
Item # 745323
GARMIN iQue 3600 Palm OS 5 PDA w/Built-in GPS
$499.99
Item # 745323
04-12-2004, 04:01 PM
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Re: Looking for after Market navigation system
Hi,
I have recently bought and installed a Garmin Streetpilot 2610 in my A6. It is a probable unit which plugs-in to the cigarette lighter. I installed a 12 volt line supplied from the battery (unswitched) and attached a female cigarette-lighter socket and routed it to come out on the left side of the shift cover - between the plastic and the carpet. Used double-sided tape to attach velcor to side wall below the glove box and on the back of the speaker/plug. I stuck the base in the middle of the dash as far forward as practical. The Streetpilot snaps in or out of this base. Apart from the single lead wire coming down from the unit to the power source, the install is neat and clean. I had the unit pluged into the cigareet lighter in the ashtray but it was messy and in the way.
I have found that the Streetpilot is a good well-designed unit. The screen is not as big as I would have liked (~2 3/4" X ~4 3/4") but it has all the funtions of a built-in unit (minus being wired into the speedometer and reverse gear). The unit uses a memory card to store your map info which you load from your PC so it's not DVD but it updates very quickly the way DVD units do and you don't have to have a DVD player so that's a plus. Garmin makes a unit that hooks-up to your speedo and reverse gear as well - it's the 2650 unit - if you want to be even more accurate, for example if you lose signal. I paid ~C$1,300.00. I concidered the Magellen Roadmate as well but the map details were not as extensive as the Garmin. There do not seem to be any after-market outboard nav systems that have larger screens, which is what I was looking for to begin with but the Garmin is a resonable alternative. Did not need an external antenna and the unit can be removed easily. Hope this helps. Good luck
I have recently bought and installed a Garmin Streetpilot 2610 in my A6. It is a probable unit which plugs-in to the cigarette lighter. I installed a 12 volt line supplied from the battery (unswitched) and attached a female cigarette-lighter socket and routed it to come out on the left side of the shift cover - between the plastic and the carpet. Used double-sided tape to attach velcor to side wall below the glove box and on the back of the speaker/plug. I stuck the base in the middle of the dash as far forward as practical. The Streetpilot snaps in or out of this base. Apart from the single lead wire coming down from the unit to the power source, the install is neat and clean. I had the unit pluged into the cigareet lighter in the ashtray but it was messy and in the way.
I have found that the Streetpilot is a good well-designed unit. The screen is not as big as I would have liked (~2 3/4" X ~4 3/4") but it has all the funtions of a built-in unit (minus being wired into the speedometer and reverse gear). The unit uses a memory card to store your map info which you load from your PC so it's not DVD but it updates very quickly the way DVD units do and you don't have to have a DVD player so that's a plus. Garmin makes a unit that hooks-up to your speedo and reverse gear as well - it's the 2650 unit - if you want to be even more accurate, for example if you lose signal. I paid ~C$1,300.00. I concidered the Magellen Roadmate as well but the map details were not as extensive as the Garmin. There do not seem to be any after-market outboard nav systems that have larger screens, which is what I was looking for to begin with but the Garmin is a resonable alternative. Did not need an external antenna and the unit can be removed easily. Hope this helps. Good luck
04-12-2004, 05:43 PM
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My advice: Don't get the usual type...
There is a new type coming on the market now that uses a central service to calculate routes and store the maps. You use a new kind of cell phone with GPS built in. This will save you tons on equipment, on map disks updates, and from obsolescence. Plus you can use it in other cars and on foot.
See a <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/8412260.htm">review</a> in today's Mercury News. An excerpt:
Posted on Mon, Apr. 12, 2004
No matter where you go, you are here
THE ERA OF CELL PHONE LOCATION TECHNOLOGY STARTS NOW
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News
If you want to avoid getting lost, you can spend $2,000 on one of those fancy electronic navigation systems for your car.
Or, if you've got a Nextel mobile phone, you can spend as little as $5.99 a month to get exactly the same kind of assistance through TeleNav, a service from a small Sunnyvale company named Televigation (www.televigation.com).
TeleNav is the most advanced example today of what the wireless industry calls ``location-based services,'' a bland label for what will be one of the most exciting and unsettling new technologies of the decade.
Mobile phones are about to become aware of their geographic location, either through receiving signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites or by triangulation among two or more cellular towers.
This information can guide you to a destination, or can be shared through the Internet -- with your consent, hopefully -- to show others where you're located.
Anxious parents will soon turn to a map on a Web page to find Johnny, who's late coming back from soccer practice, or check on Jane, who's missed curfew on a Saturday night. Employers will know whether workers are sitting in a restaurant or moving through a job site.
What's driving the transformation is the federal government's E-911 mandate, which requires cell phones to automatically transmit their position in emergencies. Wireless carriers have successfully lobbied to extend several previous deadlines, but it now looks like the industry will comply with an order to start universal E-911 by the end of 2005.
Nextel (www.nextel.com), the smallest national wireless carrier, is far ahead of the pack in shifting to location-based services. The company sells a half-dozen models with built-in GPS receivers, and has been offering location services from several providers for about a year.
None of the other national carriers -- AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless -- are doing anything yet, and haven't even announced when location services will arrive. AT&T Wireless does have a ``Find Friends'' service, although it only gives a rough estimate of area rather than a precise location.
The E-911 deadline and competition from Nextel, however, should get the national carriers moving within the next 12 months or so.
For now, TeleNav serves as a preview of coming attractions.
I borrowed a Motorola i730 phone operating on Nextel's network from Televigation, and started driving familiar routes around town -- from home to office, from supermarket to home, from office to appointments.
You enter the street address of your destination either by picking out letters with the keypad or by calling Televigation and using its computer voice-recognition system. Best of all, you can go to the Web page of your TeleNav account before starting a trip and enter the destination with your computer's keyboard.
The i730, attached to one end of a footlong flexible arm hanging off the windshield from a suction cup, never failed to know its exact location and gave me accurate turn-by-turn directions on how to reach my destinations.
Route information was displayed on the i730's small color screen, with a large left or right arrow to indicate upcoming turns. The data included the direction I was traveling, the distance to the next turn and the total remaining distance for the trip. I know now my commute to work is exactly 14 miles.
TeleNav also gives voice commands through a small speaker on the outside of i730. `Turn . . . right . . . on . . . Stevens Creek . . . Boulevard,'' says a calm female voice, or ``Veer . . . left . . . onto . . . Highway . . . 101.''
In a half-dozen test trips, TeleNav consistently picked the fastest -- not the shortest -- route and took less than a minute to recalculate my path when I deliberately ignored a turn. I'd have complete confidence using TeleNav for real in a strange city.
TeleNav can display a ``you are here'' map, although you have to do a lot of zooming in and out to get oriented on such a small screen. There's also a ``business finder'' that works as a kind of electronic Yellow Pages, showing the nearest Mexican restaurants or gas stations or hardware stores.
You can even use TeleNav as a pure GPS receiver, getting longitude and latitude readings and setting a bread-crumb trail of GPS way points.
If you make or receive a phone call, you have to suspend using TeleNav until the call is completed. This is probably a good thing, because it forces you not to talk while driving when relying on TeleNav for directions.
To get TeleNav, you first need a Nextel phone with built-in GPS and the Java operating system. There are about a half-dozen models that meet these criteria; the i730 that I used costs $149 with a two-year service contract and comes with TeleNav's software pre-loaded. You also need to subscribe to Nextel's Total Connect data service.
For $5.99, TeleNav gives you 20 trips a month. For $7.99 a month, you get unlimited trips.
Televigation also has a service called TeleNavTrack for $20 to $30 a month per phone that reports on the phone's location. Sold primarily to businesses, this allows a delivery dispatcher to see where the company's fleet is located simply by looking on a Web page. This type of service isn't new, but TeleNavTrack is much less expensive than the custom vehicle tracking system used by big fleets such as UPS and FedEx.
TeleNav costs less because all the hard work of calculating routes and generating maps is done on the company's computers, with only the results transmitted to individual phones. In-car navigation systems, in contrast, require all the computing power to ride in the vehicle, along with CDs or DVDs full of regional map data.
After trying TeleNav for several days, I'm convinced almost everyone will soon have something similar. For a few dollars a month, you are virtually guaranteed you'll never be lost again -- at least, as long as you remain within your cell phone's coverage area.
In-car systems are doomed, in much the same way car phones were doomed once mobile phones became small enough to carry.
Ultimately, I believe location tracking will become a far more widespread application for GPS in mobile phones. A Nextel spokesman told me a few pioneering individuals are already using location tracking services to keep tabs on family members.
There's an obvious threat to civil liberties here, with an obvious answer: There should be laws stating your cell phone can only be tracked with your permission, and that such permission can be canceled or suspended at your discretion.
Yet there will also be many benefits to knowing the location of family members, friends and co-workers. I'm looking forward to the day when I no longer have to call my wife, Debbie, on her cell phone to find out when she's coming home from an extended shopping trip, only to discover she's almost reached our driveway. I only regret that, because of the law I'm recommending, I'll have to tell her in advance that I'm turning on her phone's tracking feature.
Contact Mike Langberg at mike@langberg.com or (408) 920-5084. Past columns may be read at www.langberg.com.
See a <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/8412260.htm">review</a> in today's Mercury News. An excerpt:
Posted on Mon, Apr. 12, 2004
No matter where you go, you are here
THE ERA OF CELL PHONE LOCATION TECHNOLOGY STARTS NOW
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News
If you want to avoid getting lost, you can spend $2,000 on one of those fancy electronic navigation systems for your car.
Or, if you've got a Nextel mobile phone, you can spend as little as $5.99 a month to get exactly the same kind of assistance through TeleNav, a service from a small Sunnyvale company named Televigation (www.televigation.com).
TeleNav is the most advanced example today of what the wireless industry calls ``location-based services,'' a bland label for what will be one of the most exciting and unsettling new technologies of the decade.
Mobile phones are about to become aware of their geographic location, either through receiving signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites or by triangulation among two or more cellular towers.
This information can guide you to a destination, or can be shared through the Internet -- with your consent, hopefully -- to show others where you're located.
Anxious parents will soon turn to a map on a Web page to find Johnny, who's late coming back from soccer practice, or check on Jane, who's missed curfew on a Saturday night. Employers will know whether workers are sitting in a restaurant or moving through a job site.
What's driving the transformation is the federal government's E-911 mandate, which requires cell phones to automatically transmit their position in emergencies. Wireless carriers have successfully lobbied to extend several previous deadlines, but it now looks like the industry will comply with an order to start universal E-911 by the end of 2005.
Nextel (www.nextel.com), the smallest national wireless carrier, is far ahead of the pack in shifting to location-based services. The company sells a half-dozen models with built-in GPS receivers, and has been offering location services from several providers for about a year.
None of the other national carriers -- AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless -- are doing anything yet, and haven't even announced when location services will arrive. AT&T Wireless does have a ``Find Friends'' service, although it only gives a rough estimate of area rather than a precise location.
The E-911 deadline and competition from Nextel, however, should get the national carriers moving within the next 12 months or so.
For now, TeleNav serves as a preview of coming attractions.
I borrowed a Motorola i730 phone operating on Nextel's network from Televigation, and started driving familiar routes around town -- from home to office, from supermarket to home, from office to appointments.
You enter the street address of your destination either by picking out letters with the keypad or by calling Televigation and using its computer voice-recognition system. Best of all, you can go to the Web page of your TeleNav account before starting a trip and enter the destination with your computer's keyboard.
The i730, attached to one end of a footlong flexible arm hanging off the windshield from a suction cup, never failed to know its exact location and gave me accurate turn-by-turn directions on how to reach my destinations.
Route information was displayed on the i730's small color screen, with a large left or right arrow to indicate upcoming turns. The data included the direction I was traveling, the distance to the next turn and the total remaining distance for the trip. I know now my commute to work is exactly 14 miles.
TeleNav also gives voice commands through a small speaker on the outside of i730. `Turn . . . right . . . on . . . Stevens Creek . . . Boulevard,'' says a calm female voice, or ``Veer . . . left . . . onto . . . Highway . . . 101.''
In a half-dozen test trips, TeleNav consistently picked the fastest -- not the shortest -- route and took less than a minute to recalculate my path when I deliberately ignored a turn. I'd have complete confidence using TeleNav for real in a strange city.
TeleNav can display a ``you are here'' map, although you have to do a lot of zooming in and out to get oriented on such a small screen. There's also a ``business finder'' that works as a kind of electronic Yellow Pages, showing the nearest Mexican restaurants or gas stations or hardware stores.
You can even use TeleNav as a pure GPS receiver, getting longitude and latitude readings and setting a bread-crumb trail of GPS way points.
If you make or receive a phone call, you have to suspend using TeleNav until the call is completed. This is probably a good thing, because it forces you not to talk while driving when relying on TeleNav for directions.
To get TeleNav, you first need a Nextel phone with built-in GPS and the Java operating system. There are about a half-dozen models that meet these criteria; the i730 that I used costs $149 with a two-year service contract and comes with TeleNav's software pre-loaded. You also need to subscribe to Nextel's Total Connect data service.
For $5.99, TeleNav gives you 20 trips a month. For $7.99 a month, you get unlimited trips.
Televigation also has a service called TeleNavTrack for $20 to $30 a month per phone that reports on the phone's location. Sold primarily to businesses, this allows a delivery dispatcher to see where the company's fleet is located simply by looking on a Web page. This type of service isn't new, but TeleNavTrack is much less expensive than the custom vehicle tracking system used by big fleets such as UPS and FedEx.
TeleNav costs less because all the hard work of calculating routes and generating maps is done on the company's computers, with only the results transmitted to individual phones. In-car navigation systems, in contrast, require all the computing power to ride in the vehicle, along with CDs or DVDs full of regional map data.
After trying TeleNav for several days, I'm convinced almost everyone will soon have something similar. For a few dollars a month, you are virtually guaranteed you'll never be lost again -- at least, as long as you remain within your cell phone's coverage area.
In-car systems are doomed, in much the same way car phones were doomed once mobile phones became small enough to carry.
Ultimately, I believe location tracking will become a far more widespread application for GPS in mobile phones. A Nextel spokesman told me a few pioneering individuals are already using location tracking services to keep tabs on family members.
There's an obvious threat to civil liberties here, with an obvious answer: There should be laws stating your cell phone can only be tracked with your permission, and that such permission can be canceled or suspended at your discretion.
Yet there will also be many benefits to knowing the location of family members, friends and co-workers. I'm looking forward to the day when I no longer have to call my wife, Debbie, on her cell phone to find out when she's coming home from an extended shopping trip, only to discover she's almost reached our driveway. I only regret that, because of the law I'm recommending, I'll have to tell her in advance that I'm turning on her phone's tracking feature.
Contact Mike Langberg at mike@langberg.com or (408) 920-5084. Past columns may be read at www.langberg.com.
04-12-2004, 06:39 PM
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I second this suggestion...
...the iQue is a great little gadget. Its screen is smaller than most in-car units, but you can't put them in a shirt pocket. Also, it's a full-featured PDA.
There's also a very good <a href="http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=65ba8deda575adaac210c83c77c68c8 5&forumid=108" target="_blank">iQue forum</a>. HPH
There's also a very good <a href="http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=65ba8deda575adaac210c83c77c68c8 5&forumid=108" target="_blank">iQue forum</a>. HPH
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04-12-2004, 09:55 PM
#9
Thomas Guide worked incredibly well when I moved to SoCal from rural Canada.
I would get a general idea of where I wanted to go, and then paid attention to the neighbourhood. If I started to see bars on the windows, I would back-track and figure out a new route. Over all though, I could navigate anywhere with minimal hassle - allowing for the occassional stop to get bearings.
However, some people don't have a good sense for the compass points and should consider a Nav system of some kind.
However, some people don't have a good sense for the compass points and should consider a Nav system of some kind.
04-13-2004, 08:44 AM
#10
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Buy a good color handheld GPS or a pocket computer w/GPS
It'll cost you half or less, can be upgraded reasonably, and you can take it with you.
Built-in Nav is ridiculously overpriced and will probably be out-dated and unsupported before you replace the OEM tires.
Built-in Nav is ridiculously overpriced and will probably be out-dated and unsupported before you replace the OEM tires.