A friend of mine recently asked if I would write a post about why I decided to get rid of my carputer system and why I chose the gps navigation system that I did to replace it with.
I decided to get rid of the carputer and switch to a gps navigation system for several reasons.
First, it was not portable, and I could not easily move it from car to truck to freinds car.
Second, I never could get it to properly sync with my cellphone so that I could have hands free calling. This was one of the main reasons for a carputer in the first place. I did manage to get it to work early on, but in order to hear the caller I had to pump up the volume then I would get this terrible bass reverberation in the car, it was madness. I tried all sorts of ‘cheap’ mics and nothing helped. I stopped useing the phone integration about a week after it was in place. I am hoping this gps navigation system that I recently won on ebay will not do the same.
Third, I did not like the navigation system (map software) I was using. I can not even recall what it was that I was using right now, but it was hard to punch in where you wanted to go in a hurry. The menu system was very cumbersome and you surely would have a hard time doing with the menu system while you were driving. You would really have to park, find your destination, then pull back onto the road and go. Thats the safe way to do it anyways.
Forth, the touchscreen is the main thing that enables you to communicate with your carputer and if it doesn’t work, the rest is of no use. On occasion the screen would just go completely white when you touched it. I would have to pull the power to the screen, wait a second, and plug the power back in. Then it would work for a bit and sometimes be fine, sometimes do it all over again. This was beginning to become unreliable. To replace it was way too expensive.
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I started thinking that my main uses for a carputer were phone integration, gps navigation system, mp3 storage piped through my existing sound system eliminating the needs for cd’s, and thats about it. That’s all I really needed. With all that in mind, I decided, hey why not sell all of this stuff back on ebay where I purchased it all and I will be able to get what I need.
So if you remember I did sell all my stuff on ebay.