Another cheap GPS...

I recently had to replace my 4.3" GPS (bricked during an experimentation, doh!) with
another cheap one advertised as "Galaxy's Thinnest GPS Portable Navigator" and sold at roughly €68 on Chinavasion.com and eBay. Despite the usual 21.5% VAT on arrival and an unexpected gigantic hidden fee from UPS (€13.5 !!!), it ended up just the same price as my previous device.

The main differences are: a nicer look, a bigger 5" screen, a faster CPU, WinCE 6.0, but no Bluetooth.



In many places, this unit is advertised as having a SiRFAtlas III but the one I received definitely reports a 533Mhz SiRFAtlas IV CPU which supposedly  means lower consumption and faster position fix acquisition from a cold start. I reckon it's the first time I see a GPS device picking the position from my office desk.

A microSD is present in the GPS unit, and it's filled with maps and voices for most parts of Europe.
iGO 8.3 is present, so it would seem ready for Text-to-Speech...if only the TTS dlls were not missing!
In fact the 2GB card provided is a bit too small to hold all the maps together with the required Loquendo files.

So, after cleaning some un-needed files, I could add them and it worked fine.

I was curious about the "enable the especial voice" option in the Volume settings, so I enabled it, expecting to hear something like "Hola, soy tu sistema de navegación por satélite!", but instead, it just enables some chime sounds to the touch screen interface.

About unlocking: well...the usual tricks to enable the ActiveSync mode didn't work.The user interface provides an option to browse to the executable to launch from the Navigation button (no more shell.ini or gpsrunfile.txt), but trying USBSetting.exe or a registry editor did not give the expected result and the unit still connects as a USB Flash Drive to the PC.

However the interface is already quite nice and complete with a good player, some games and it doesn't require special trick to swap from iGO to Amigo to TomTom, so this is not really necessary...but still, for the craic of it!...I guess it is possible to tweak it though, so I'll update this page when I come across a solution.



Pros:
- iGO 8.3 pre-installed
- SiRFAtlas-IV (despite the manual saying III)
- Good battery life 
- Fast response
- Compact casing for a 5" display with elegant look
- Navigation software can be swapped directly from the user interface.
- Speaker can be set very loud
- Good display quality and screen brightness

Cons:
- no bluetooth
- finishing could be better, you'll have to wipe some extra glue but that's all.
- less straightforward to unlock
- the cable of the car charger is a bit short

Product references: TMCDOV2ZWL, CVHW-CS23, GPS-C3250
Successor: CVSB-G252