RoadPilot MicroGo
Here is my review of the RoadPilot MicroGo:
It was about £85 (including Swedish VAT at 25% from Misco.se) and that is with
a 6 month subscription.
A further 3 years subscription is about £100.
It needs to be updated on a regular basis in order to keep working, so there is
no point stealing one!
There are some other products out there with free subscribtion, but to have the
same functionallity as the MicroGo you have to
pay around £150 including Swedish VAT.
So this was not much more expensive.
And the other products cover less geography.
I want functionallity that included showing grafically
the allowed speed at the camera position, not just making noise until I have
slowed down enough. Another option was the GPS4 from Navirad, but it is bigger
and uglier.
The MicroGo is much smaller and better designed
than any of the other products available here.
They claim it works straight out of the box - and it did!
It was also preconfigured for my country (Sweden) with all setting and language
and everything.
You get the MicroGo, a suction-cup with
ball-joint thing to stick it to your windscreen with, a cigarette lighter power
cord (with built in power conversion down to usb level), a usb cable to connect
it to your PC, a CD with software and a product manual. All nicely packaged.
Easy to deal with the one button interface and the display is clear.
The colour backlight really only shows up well in the "dark", in
daylight the colour is nowhere near as obvious as they would have you believe in
the marketing material - but such are LCD screens and I am happy with it anyway.
The software (an application and a driver) installed easily just like the (on
CD) supplied software manual said it would.
Then you need to register in order to update (if you dont update regularly it
stops working). This also worked well.
I ran into problems with the actual download of the update (Download interupted).
I thought it was my firewalls etc but nothing I tried helped. I put it down to
go away and think and eat. When I came back it worked great. So probably a
problem at their end.
In the mean time I had e-mailed their support, and I had
answer the following morning that their log showed that I had made a successful
download.
I was amazed to find that the over-read on my old Mercedes speedometer was only
approx 1-2 km/h compared to the MicroGo. Other
cars I have driven with GPS devices have all had the expected 10%-ish over read.
Could be that they have built over-read into the MicroGo,
but I don´t see why they would. Will try it in another car and see.
The suction cup thingy is not bad, but I will try fixing it to the dash with
velcro instead.
All in all I am happy with my new toy!