Monday, Jun 21, 2004 at 19:43
If these things need to be plugged into a laptop anyway.., another option might be a tablet PC. These have a couple of advantages:
1. Still have touchscreen
2. Only two devices (gps and tablet), rather than gps, laptop, and separate screen
3. current screens are pretty good and can be viewed from an angle reasonably
well - a mate of mine is mounting his in the middle of his patrol, and flat against the dash, both driver and passenger can see screen OK
Couple of disadvantages:
1. Additional cost - probably only a reasonable solution if you are in the market for a laptop anyway..
Without getting into tax too much (not my expertise), if you can salary sacrifice a laptop, if you get the receipt in your own name then you can also claim this on your personal tax.
That is, if you are paying 47 per cent, you pretax based on purchase - then on personal tax, claim 47 per cent (depreciated over 3 years), the the laptop has only cost 6% of face value - makes it pretty attractive.
This to me is double dipping - BUT - it's all above board - I've bought two laptops like this, and all my mates have too - you can do one of these a year (but not a desktop) - can also do phones and PDA's in the same way - might be of interest for those looking at some of the new PDA with GPS module.
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