Another Battery Life Experience

[tecman]

Got my Ique today. What a piece of technology packed in a little space. I was perhaps most impressed by the overall build quality. Only negative I've found is that the voice recorder quality is poor.

Back to the battery. I headed home, fully charged. Set the route and turned the backlight off just using reflected afternoon light. WAAS and power save were both off.

The ride was about 40 minutes, and the battery indicator was only down one indicated notch. I was zooming in and out every minute or two, and it only "slept" once for just a part of a minute. Also if some didn't realize, if you do let it auto-power down while running a route, the GPS keeps running and it will wake up and talk when the next voice command is needed.

Overall the battery seems to get gobbled up faster with the backlight on, and the GPS is sure a heavy consumer. I will keep my 76S for outdoor hiking, etc. The Ique will be okay for short jaunts away from the outlet.

paul

[reinbeau]

Only negative I've found is that the voice recorder quality is poor. Could you expand on this a bit? This is one of the features I saw first when I was looking at the iQue in Handheld Computing. The GPS is a bonus, a new thing to learn.

[nagyg]

How could you see anything with the backlight completely off??
G.

[tecman]

As for the sound quality, I will say that MP3s when played back sound very good. However the recording aspect is a bit rough. The recorded sound is poor tone quality, a surprising amount of noise and seems to have a high level of distortion as well. I tried varoius scenarios, and in each case the voices were not very good, and even sometimes hard to understand. The internal microphone may be part of the problem, as it seems to highlight ambient noise. As a personal recorder, with speaking right into it, it's not too bad, but for meetings, etc, I feel that it is not usable. Also the sampling rate/method results in large file sizes, about 300K for 10 seconds or so.

The comment about the backlight: The screen is a backlight transreflective. In bright ambient light, the screen is perfectly readable with reasonable good color saturation. In the car, the ambient light through the windows was enough for the screen to be easily seen.

paul