Ι had heard a lot of good things about the SiRF III chip so I decided to replace my ‘trusty’ (but with its fair share of problems) Fortuna ClipOn GPS unit with a newer receiver. After looking at the different options, I opted for Holux’s GPSlim 236, a small, light receiver with decent battery life, excellent reception and an MMCX port for an external antenna — a feature shared between it and the Fortuna and that the most newer SiRF III based receivers lacked — perhaps due to the high sensitivity of the chip.
Before I start writing (ranting) about the Holux receiver I am obliged to state the following: All Bluetooth GPS receivers on sale today seem to be cheap, flakey and at best a hack, a shell, a crude integration of the SiRF chip, a ceramic antenna, a bluetooth radio and some LEDs. Most are made by Taiwanese companies with little experience in designing and manufacturing electronics and little or no QA processes.
My Fortuna unit was generallly well thought out: it had a 4mm (iPAQ type) DC connector, a MCX antenna connector, used commonly available Nokia-compatbile Li-ion batteries. It’s power cable had a USB connector on the other end, so you could power it from a computer USB port the bundled AC charger or the included car charger (that also had a USB port). On the other end the cable split into two, so you could power a PDA and the GPS at the same time, e.g. if you used it in a car. This was excellent design. Unfortunately, the device had other shortcomings: The power and chip selection (it had two chips, the XTrac and a normal SiRF II) switch was at best badly designed, the device was quite thick (couldn’t fit in a pocket without creating a weird-looking bulge) and heavy — at least compared to the Holux. It’s performance was ok. Not spectacular, but not horrible either. Sometimes it might take ages to acquire a fix, but that was fixed after upgrading the firmware to XTrac 2.02. Over Bluetooth.
Now, the Holux. Well, that’s another story. Despite the nicer packaging and the higher performance — surely attributed to the SiRF III chip and not to Holux engineering — the device is a hack. And a bad one at it. Intermittent Bluetooth, no lanyard, no y-cable, misleading mini-USB-port-that-is-really-RS232-and-power-in-disguise. It does have a nokia compatible battery too, and it does sport a MMCX antenna connector (worse than MCX, but hey, you practically don’t need an antenna with SiRF III!). It is also much lighter and smaller than the ClipOn. The performance is much better. When it works.
I’ve only had the device for three days and the Bluetooth radio has died and sprung back to life more than 3-4 times. Obviously that’s not a very trustworthy unit to take with you to the jungle/desert/mountain/trip/wherever. Plus, the lack of a y-cable (and the fact that you have to pay for a special RS-232/USB cable — or make one yourself) is very annoying. Now, while Holux also supports Serial operation (as opposed to Bluetooth) you need the damned ‘special’ cable for that. As if that’s not enough, according to the manual, you cannot flash the unit over Bluetooth (so you need that cable) and Holux has not released any firmware updates to the public, but ask that you send the unit by post/courier to Taiwan for them to flash it.
All in all I think I’ll probably never buy a Holux product again and I’ll be returning this to the retailer ASAP. Yet, so many people have been complaining for practically all Taiwanese manufacturers (Fortuna included — I guess I was lucky) that I guess I should treat GPS receivers as consumables nowadays or just opt for a much more expensive unit; unfortunately US and European manufacturers, such as Garmin for example, are not that fast to the market. Sigh.
