Tuesday, May 2, 2006
A Truly Pocketable All-In-One Package - The Pharos Traveler GPS 525 (Part 1)
Posted by Don Tolson in "HARDWARE" @ 08:00 AM
Use As a Pocket PC
After I got the Traveler 525 and charged it up, I set up a partnership with my laptop and proceeded to load it up with the appointments, contacts, to-dos, favorites and synchronized files via Activesync 4.1, which I already had loaded. As any of you who have been reading my reviews of other PIM applications knows by now, I tend to keep a considerable amount of data about past appointments and tasks online, since I frequently have to refer back to them when discussing billing with my clients. It wasn’t a problem for the 128mb of flash memory available.
The Traveler 525 uses a Samsung SC32442X33 CPU running @ 300 Mhz. It has a RAM size of 64Mb, combined with 128Mb of Flash memory, running on a 32bit data bus.
Figure 12: The specs screen from the Traveler 525.
The Traveler 525 comes with a 1100mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery which is, while not huge, not a bad sized unit.
Figure 13: The back panel removed, showing the battery. The external GPS antenna connection is under the removable rubber insert at the top left. You can see the stylus running along the bottom (side) of the unit.
Pharos’ documentation says that the battery is good for about four hours of walk-about navigation with the GPS unit on. Unfortunately, Windows Mobile 5 with Activesync’s built-in desire to turn on the unit and attempt to synchronize every five minutes does nothing to help the situation. I frequently opened the case to find the unit already on and running, even though I was sure I had turned the unit off when I put it away. Thus, the battery was never able to run for an entire day, and with WM5’s approach to power management, I never did see a message telling me that the remaining power was getting low. Most times, I’d try to turn the unit on, get no response to the power button, and have to wait until I could get to my car or to home to re-connect it to an external power source. (Note, it will also recharge via the USB connection when sync-ing with your desktop.) Fortunately, because of persistent memory, all my data was still there when I got it running again.
Figure 14: The Traveler 525's Today screen, as it comes out of the box. Notice the icons in the System Tray (circled, bottom right).
Pharos configures the Traveler with its navigation software, called Ostia, preloaded and accessible directly via either the front panel button, or a Today screen plug-in (see above). They also provide some very useful icons in the System Tray, as seen in the bottom right corner of the screen. The first, which looks like a Pocket PC, allows you to sequentially change the orientation of the 525's display from Portrait to Landscape to Landscape (the other way) and back to Portrait. (Sorry, no upside down!) I found this particularly handy, especially when I wanted a bit more horizontal display of a map.
The next icon, looking like a battery, goes directly to the Power settings screen, and the last runs the Communications Manager.
