Tuesday, Apr 12, 2005 at 14:55
Hi Crazie,
I am new to this whole _Permanent_Painted_Coatings.aspx thing too. However I did some research before I started bidding.
It would appear that the HP Ipaq is the market leader however that also means they hold their value better than other brands.
You need to be able to connect a GPS to it. Be it CF (compact flash), SDIO (secure digital able to take communication devices) or Bluetooth. You can even connect a handheld GPS to some PPCs although I wanted to avoid that to keep the bulk down.
I ended up getting a Toshiba E570. Seems to be an Audiovox Maestro in disguise (although Toshiba has double the memory) as in the Nissan Patrol/Ford Maverick. It has both an SD slot and a CFII slot. I use a Holux Ultra CFI GPS card and will soon have a 1gig SD storage card. They can both be accessed at the same time.
Some internet chatter says that the E570 has too small an internal battery however I connect it to vehicle power anyway. They also complain of a limited aftermarket such as keyboards but I'm not interested in any of this stuff anyway. They also mention the standard stylus scratches the screen and my screen is scratched but no worse than any other older screen that hasn't been protected.
I got the CF GPS as these are cheaper and keeps the _Permanent_Painted_Coatings.aspx and GPS as one unit. Although it would seem that PPCs that have both expansion slots are limited as it does increase its thickness a little.
This unit runs Pocket Windows 2002 while the current version is 2003 SE. Still works fine though.
I'm a little hazy on the memory side however:
Look for one with 64/32 memory. This would appear to be that you can have a max of 32mb system memory if you only use 32mb for storage. You can use up to the whole 64 for storage however your programmes will run real slow or not at all. I think this is volatile too so if you flatten your battery completely you might lose data depending on what backup memory power it has. This is why you will probably need an SD card too.
The older models had 32/16 memory while some newer ones have 128/64. Some low end new ones have pitiful memory sizes however.
Take a look at Ebay and see what you want to spend then Google for info on models in that range. Trust me there is heaps of info on all the models.
I also ended up getting a wireless CF card for it from Ebay too. For $50 I couldn't resist. Still cheaper than getting a wireless enabled _Permanent_Painted_Coatings.aspx.
Hope it all helps. I did carry on a bit.
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