Holux GR 213 Sirf Star III Car GPS Receiver

To all our fellow technological gadget buffs out there who get excited at the conveniences that new gadgets offer including but not limited to the field of Transportation we say, read on!

Mill has always loved Geography, maps, and brags that she can find her way out or thru any city by following the sunrise/sunset to guide her to East, West, North or South. However, for the not so oriented traveler, we suggest a reasonably priced option of purchasing this Holux GPS Receiver for your laptop. Especially if you take frequent trips and consider yourself a Road Warrior and you didn't recently purchase or lease a vehicle with a built in Navigation System on board.

We happen to have purchased a 2002 Mercury Mountaineer which has many options but GPS wasn't one of them. So being a tech savvy geek that Mill is we opted for not junking or selling our old IBM 600E laptop on eBay and instead kept it to use with the Holux GPS USB Receiver that we recently purchased. We installed Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 on this old laptop and also an MS Reader and Text To Speech Component downloadable for free on Microsoft's site, and WALA!

We test drove our GPS Unit on a long 2 hour drive to a conference this week and it performed beautifully for us. Of course we must state that we do believe one must still have some general skills in map reading and orientation to successfully use this since once you are "off route" it does not tell you how to get back on the route automatically. Also, if you are off into a school of sourts where the road/route may actually begin on the main road, the female voice will simply keept prompting you to "proceed to route" which can be frustrating if you have no sense of orientation and no clue where you are. After about 15 minutes of going in the wrong direction we realized that activating the GPS Trail option would help us to see the trail of where we had already been along with where we were heading to. Once we turned on this feature and zoomed out the map area to view the nearby highways we successfully got back on course and on the route where the voice prompts began again and actually were correct for the most part.

Sometimes when you are on a 3 lane highway and you switch to the right lane the voice prompt may incorrectly tell you that you are off route, and sometimes it may not prompt you in time to turn into a location such as a hotel you are looking for, but generally if you keep your eyes open and alert you will be successful in finding your way to your destination. It still helps to have an additional person along for the ride to help navigate as it can be very dangerous to try to look down and/or change any settings while in transit and we strongly recommend you pull over for any tweaking.

To summarize, it is a cool gadget for the tech savvy and road savvy, however the general public may still opt for the traditional local map and someone to help him/her read it as you drive along or simple written down directions. Sometimes technology can be a double edged sword where it slows you down as much as you thought it would help to speed things up! :-)

Thanks for your interest in our review and happy and safe motoring to all! We also encourage you to visit our store at www.stores.ebay.com/miscellaneous-mills and view some of our portraits at www.freewebs.com/millnsue

Happy eBaying!

MillnSue

I ordered this product to hook to laptop computer instead of buying a GPS device. I wanted a large screen that would be easy to view and since we have several laptops I decided to try this.My wife has to make out of town trips to take children to hospitals and other places she hasn't been. I installed this on the laptop and it works very well. With Microsoft Trips and Streets it creates the route and is very easy to follow. It tells your speed,when you are off route and re-routes to correct route and a host of other advantages. We are very pleased with this product and with the large screen the children enjoy watching the progress we are making in the trip. We think this product deserves and excellent rating and recommend it use according to manufactors recommendations.