Previous page: Daily Crap 2009-08-08
Next page: Daily Crap 2009-08-15

Daily Crap 2009-08-13

  1. I usually don't buy items just because they're on sale, but NewEgg had a great sale on refurbished TomTom GPS units so I bought one. I've been using it to get around an unfamiliar town as I run errands. Today it saved me about an hour that I would have lost calling home for directions, but nobody knows because TomTom handled everything.

    The usability of a talking GPS while driving is fantastic. Any deviation from the route will silently trigger it to find a new route from where you are, then it will operate as if nothing happened. If you encounter construction, all you have to do is take the detour and let the GPS figure it out.

    Unfortunately, doing anything else with it is a drag due to the misleadingly uniform UI and spontaneous touch screen. Every screen consists of either six buttons with icons and captions, or a keyboard with numbers or letters. That makes it difficult to tell where you are in the menu hierarchy, how you could get there again, and what you're changing. Sometimes pressing anywhere on the screen will trigger an additional press in the lower right corner of the screen. Conveniently enough, that's where the confirmation button usually is. However, the joy I get on arriving at my destination despite construction and my lousy sense of direction overwhelms these short-comings and I, for the moment, love it.

Posted Aug 13, 2009, in the afternoon.

Comments

Click here to view the comments on this post.