The Garmin 496...a teenager's review

On Jul 6, 11:19 am, Jay Honeck wrote:
Now that my son is taking flight lessons, I'm letting him fly in
(Read: Mary is relinquishing) the front seat more often. This plants
him squarely in front of our panel-docked Garmin 496, the latest-and-
greatest portable GPS from Garmin.

We've flown behind this unit since OSH '06, and he has heard us
discussing its quirks and limitations, but he's never had any first-
hand experience programming it. Remember, the boy is 16 years old,
and has almost literally grown up with a Playstation/X-Box/PC game
controller in his hands. His thumbs are highly over-developed, from
10 million hours of video-game playing, and he is turning into an
absolute whiz with computers.

In short, he is an expert on all things that use graphics.

After working the 496 for a few flights, with all of its bizarre
hiccups (I.E.: The screen completely disappears when you slew the
cursor across the screen) and horrible graphics (displayed on a
postage-stamp-sized screen), his priceless comment was:

"If Microsoft built the X-Box the way Garmin built the 496, they'd
have sold about five of them..."

And you know what? He's absolutely right. We pilots were so
desperate for in-cockpit weather that we willingly paid $3000 (!) for
a $250 dollar unit that performs worse than a video game.

BTW: If you've never played with an X-Box, or a Sony Playstation game
platform, this post won't make any sense to you -- which is precisely
what Garmin was counting on. Go out and borrow your kids (or grand-
kids) game unit for a couple of hours, and see what REAL graphics
capability looks like. (And if you want to see how hand-held
graphical displays *should* perform, borrow their PSP handheld
Playstation unit.)

I sure hope Garmin steps up to the plate, performance-wise, with their
(much anticipated) new product at OSH...
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

I agree. When it comes to UI design, aviation products just do not
stack up. It's not just GPS units either; I've bought flight sim
addons that had the most idiotic way of installing. I've seen many
PAYWARE logbook/weather/planning applications that seemed like they
were written for Windows 3.1

I have about 500 hours in GNS430 planes, and one thing that ****es me
off, is the slowness of it. I press a button, and theres a slight
delay before the unit accepts the input. It just makes it feel slow
and sluggish. I had a graphing calculator in college that costs 1/10
the price, was less powerful, and still wasn't nearly as slow.