N-Philes

Hands on: Ecco GPS Review

Posted December 2nd 2009 by Gareth Trinkwon.

I recently picked up this little gadget with the hopes that it'd be a useful tool on my aspiring travelling plans. The idea is pretty simple, you go to a place you'll want to get back to later on, switch the Ecco GPS on and then save the location into memory. Then, when you're the other side of town and need to get back to your car / hotel / whatever, you switch the Ecco back on and hit return. It'll then generate a directional arrow to your destination along with the distance (in metres).

The device is small and designed to be carried on a keyring along with your keys, the button layout is pretty simple. You have a lock button, used to calibrate and lock locations to memory, a return button, used to retrieve directions to your saved locations, and three numerical buttons used to reference up to three saved locations. The power button is located on the side along with a small USB-B connector used for charging.

Overall, it works pretty well. Once the device has synced up with the nearest satellite, directions can be accessed for each of the three locations pretty much instantly. I must say that I've had a few issues getting the thing to sync up at times, leaving the device unusable until it can find a satellite. I got a chance to experiment with it during a brief vacation in Paris, as well as the towns and villages around where I live (South East England), and there seemed to be no noticeable difference in the reception or performance of the device. The bundled instructions inform you that it doesn't work indoors, and that it's an inherent problem with GPS and not the device (don't car sat-navs work fine indoors though?). I had some trouble using it when sat in a car and train as well. It seems to work best in wide open spaces, but it still generally takes up to a minute to sync, which is a little disappointing. Though perhaps I'm expecting too much from something that has been designed to be small enough to attach to a key ring.

Though it did point the direction and distance to home from the top of the Eiffel Tower. I thought that was pretty rad.

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