Finally purchased a Sat Nav, Mio Navman M300 & am very pleased with it. Its saving me a lot of miles & therefore fuel.
Two things though. It shows speed in MPH, which is always 3mph slower than the speedo reads - which is likely to be the more accurate?
Secondly, the battery life is terrible, only an hour or two, so really it needs to be left connected to the in car charger all the time.
Seems like most sat navs are like this - why do they consume so much power?
The SatNav reading is the accurate reading. Many cars speedos overread by a margain similar to yours.
The screen uses the power.
Most speedos read over. Good for bar room betting. And for having the car serviced early. A win win for the makers. In these days it would be simple to make them as accurate as you could read.
A small TV would too.
You mean use a GPS?
The speedo in my car (Audi A4) does agree (+/- one digit) with GPS from my phone, quite noticiable how many people *think* they're driving around at 30/60/70 mph when they're a few mph under.
Especially when they are in 50mph roadwords with a SPECS cameras.
Then they decide to be policemen and make you do 47mph and refuse to move over because their speedo says 50. A gentle nudge on the bumper usually gets them to move and let me do the 55mph that will not see me get a ticket.
If anyone hit my back bumper when I was doing 45 - 50mph, I'd probably jam on my brakes.
I think it might be the gps reciever circuitry that slurps it the most.
If we use the GPS facility on the wifes iPhone it gobbles up battery power much faster (a couple of hours of continuous use?)
The last time I did that I caused a caravan to overturn on the M5.
then realise it was a polish trucker with 3 licenses and tacho cards that's fallen asleep at the wheel, he prolly wont even wake up from the little bump as his 44 ton truck drives over your car :)
The GPS signal is coming from distant satellites, and is tiny - so it requires some fancy, and power hungry, circuitry at the receiving end.
Last time I saw that happen on a Motorway - to a Range Rover - it flipped over. Braking hard and got hit in the back.
I used to have a Mini with a calibrated Police speedo. It was only certified accurate with a particular make and type of tyre and when the tyre pressure was correct.
Colin Bignell
Not with recent chipsets. My couple of years old TomTom bluetooth dongle with tiny built in Li battery lasts at least 12hrs continuous.
iPhone say no more.... but yes having GPS on in virtually any phone really clobbers battery life.
The GPS signal is coming from distant satellites, and is tiny - so it requires some fancy, and power hungry, circuitry at the receiving end.
I use on oldish tom tom go 700 and the battery life on that is good, 4hrs at least. got blue tooth as well.
I think I might do a bit more than that. It's called a fist.
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But would you do 47mph in the right hand lane when the left hand lane is clear and deliberately hold up the cars behind you?
If the signs said "stay in lane" then I'd probably do so.
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