Picked up our ‘Navigo‘ sat nav units from the Citylink depot this morning. From there we went on what appears to becoming a weekly sabbatical to Meadowhall. We went under the guise of buying Emma a necklace, but ended up – of course – returning with full bellies from La Tasca, and more toys. Specifically, the Guitar Hero III game that I said only 6 days ago that I’d not buy.
One highlight of our time around an exceptionally busy Meadowhall was Aimee walking around the centre, holding my hand. She’s becoming more and more reluctant to idly sit in her pram, and likes to walk around holding our hands. I was as chuffed as hell walking down the busy covered ‘streets’ of Meadowhall, holding Aimee’s hand whilst she giggled madly, walking properly, like a little girl. We pick up a waking ‘harness’ for her from Mothercare, we’ll see what she’s like in it in the coming days. It’s amazing – every day that passes, she becomes more a little girl, and less a toddler. I can’t believe she’s only sixteen months old.
We get home and have a crack at Guitar Hero, Aimee’s knackered from all her walking – and it proves to be bloody good fun! I spend most of the evening thrashing out monster choons, only for Emma to have a go and completely decimate my high scores. Unbelievable. I thought I’d have a chance on a game like this – all the singing games, like Singstar, she just trounces everyone on, I thought this I might just have a chance with! Not so! Must practice.
On to the sat navs. The units themselves look very tidy, and are certainly less ‘fat’ than the TomTom devices I’ve used before. The finish on the units is remarkably good – especially for imported cheap Chinese sat navs. They come with a USB charger, fag lighter charger and window mount – everything you need, really.
The manuals are funny – written in Chinglish (“Navigator the whole World-wild”) and the software – the downright bizarrely titled ‘TurboDog’ is, well, awful. Thankfully I bought these fully in the knowledge that TomTom software would run on them.
Installing TomTom is a breeze – just copy a regular TomTom install from a Windows Mobile PDA onto the Navigo’s SD card and place a copy of your fully bought and paid for maps on the card too. It’s pretty much as easy as that. All that’s left to do is to rename the Tomtom installation folder on the SD card to ‘Mobilenavigator’, and the tomtom.exe to ‘mobilenavigator.exe’ and reboot. When you select the ‘Navigation’ option on the Navigo menu, it will fire up TomTom. The one last thing is to tell TomTom that your GPS device is an ‘Other NMEA GPS device’ on COM1/4800. No messing about with firmware or re-flashing required.
I understand that you can bugger about with these and reveal a full WindowsCE environment and install whatever you please, but I’m quite happy for mine to be a dedicated Sat Nav.
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