| I recently had a chance to test this unit "in the wild" when I spent a week hiking in Yosemite Valley, doing extended hikes each day. In a nutshell, this unit gets a thumbs down. Although it behaved reasonably well on my first hike I found the following problems towards the end of that hike and on most subsequent hikes: It frequently lost it's fix on the satellites. It could take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes to re-establish a connection. Several times on each hike, it powered down my Visor with no indication that it had done so. I'd take the unit out to look at how my tracklog was going only to find it had missed a big chunk of it. After one of these powerdowns, when I turned the unit back on, it typically took a VERY long time to relink to the satellites...10-15 minutes was not uncommon and, in one case, I gave up and just packed the unit away after an hour of waiting. Some of the software is pretty cool in concept but very buggy in execution. On my first hike, I recorded Waypoints at every significant point of interest on the hike. At the end of my 6.5 mile hike, I told the unit to convert the tracklog to a Route. It auto-generated a ton of it's own waypoints (understandable given that this was a very twisty, windy route) but it didn't use any of the ones I had recorded and, when it was done, it told me that the 6.5 mile route was now 19.5 miles long! ... this unit here says he got up to 8 hours on a set of batteries. While that's nominally about right based on my experience, I also found that if the batteries were used for more than about 3 or 4 hours, there was a very noticeable decrease in the unit's ability to keep a fix on the satellites. My impression of this unit went from "REALLY COOL" upon first powering it up to "I WANT MY MONEY BACK" within the first couple of times I used it. ... A final thought to consider...the Springboard concept is cool but do you really need your Visor to do everything? Certain specialized tasks are just better done by a dedicated unit | .jpg)
