On Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 6:32:39 PM UTC-7, 6PK wrote:
On Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 5:19:49 PM UTC-7, jfitch wrote:
On Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 2:44:06 PM UTC-7, wrote:
I am something of a collector of these things. I have an LX9000 in the panel, and fly with an Oudie IGC running standalone as an additional display. The PF feeds traffic to the LX and to a Butterfly.

When in another glider I use the Oudie IGC - fully standalone, an IGC logger, what I consider to be a great interface (if you invest the time to know it and to set it up), and with a big internal battery. I think it is the gold standard in standalone devices, and has significant advantages over the expensive dedicated devices such as LX, Zeus, Clearnav and Air Avionics.

I also own an S8 on which I have XC Soar and Skydemon - also Tophat but I prefer XC Soar. I changed from iOs to get Oudie Live and XC Soar. I carry it in the pocket of the glider but have never had to turn it on. When flying power I use Skydemon on the S8.

I also own a Kobo Glo HD with Bluefly vario/GPS bought from http://gethighstayhigh.co.uk/
running XC Soar. I don't use it. IMO the benefits of colour and a phone touchscreen make the S8 a better device for XC Soar than the bigger and superb in sunlight eink device.

All these devices are fine for sunlight readability IMO, unlike earlier generations. Early monochrome iPaqs were good (I used Winpilot) but from the time colour came in until the Oudie 2 sunlight readability was a real issue. On these devices it isn't.

Just goes to show what different people prefer. I consider the Oudie/SYM UI to be awful. I tried to like it but cannot. In my opinion, XCSoar is slightly better, Winpilot was clearly superior, and iGlide is far superior. iGlide on an iPhone 6 or later (with built in barograph) makes a very good stand alone tactical flight computer. It lacks the IGC legal recorder in the Oudie IGC though.
I would agree with most but how is iGlide far superior? Forgive my ignorance please.....

I did say "in my opinion" and opinions may differ. It will be difficult to explain why, unless you have tried all of these offerings for yourself. I own them all, own the hardware, have the interfaces installed in the glider and on any day could run any of them. Broadly speaking, configuration, task entry, task editing, zooming, and panning are much quicker, and less verbose. I credit part of this to the hundreds of millions of dollars of development that has been sunk into general smartphone UI, with all the hooks necessary to take advantage of it available for free to the developer. Window CE has not had any development done on it for many years now (predating smartphones). XCSoar using Android in theory could take advantage but they are handicapped by needing to make the code and UI work across a very wide variety of OS and hardware, this is always a compromise. I credit the remaining to the developers who looked at the problem with a modern view, rather than one rooted in Windows 3.1/CE UI which dates from the last century. iGlide was designed from the beginning around a modern smartphone interface, while SYM and XCSoar have tried to adapt grudgingly to it. Winpilot made the jump more properly, but the iOS version has never really been finished.

Sadly, Air Avionics have done themselves a huge disservice by not providing a free demo mode app which I believe would result in much wider deployment, given that all their competition does so.