Holux 53CL
by Leion on Dec.15, 2007, under General
Bought the Holux 53CL GPS at the Sitex PC show at the start of the month.
Seems impressive out of box. There is a toggle master switch at the back of the unit, and a on/off switch beside the LCD. The toggle switch has to be switched to the on position before we can use the frontal switch to power on the unit. However, when mounted onto the vehicle bracket, the toggle switch is not reachable.
The set runs on windows. However when I turn it on, I get the famous windows error screen. Some error in some missing executable file. Best. This will be fixed after inserting the included SD card. Good impression right from the start.
The set comes with 5 maps. For Singapore and Malaysia. I am not able to know which map is current the active map from the menu. I think this is a bug. Even though, for the same area, different maps may show different things. Hence this means that there is a need to change maps often.
Battery life is not very impressive. It goes dead after almost 1.5 hours of usage. I am not sure if I am correct on this, but the set seemed to take a much long time to lock its location when the battery is not full. Refusal of following the route for too many times many give the unit an error too. I was playing with the unit in simulation mode and searched for a few locations before I get another application error. It is really nothing. I just need to restart the unit like how I do for my desktop to get it running again.
Navigation on “Recommanded” mode may result in hitting of expressways even though there is a short and faster way of getting to a nearby place. Diversion from the planned route may take a long or short time, again I think this is correlated to the battery.
The good thing about Holux 53CL is that it comes with Text To Speech (TTS). I think this is an important feature. The down side is that I am not able to avoid ERP routes which I read is supported by Garmin sets. Another good but useless feature is, when navigating in 3D mode, the location of the sun, or moon will be displayed in the skyline. I have not really verified that the sun/moon location is correct. But this pleases my colleague whom I send home from work.
UPDATE: After a few fatal errors, the set becomes corrupted. When I on it, it shows a permanent busy hourglass and does not computes the route to any location. Changing any settings on the set is useless. I managed to revive the set by replacing all the files in the SD card with a backup copy.
