A few clicks have revealed a number of details about the device. Unfortunately, I suspect that it'll bust, when all is said and done.
Preloaded with maps of North America, this thing has a 4" display and in WinCE powered - not a bad thing. It does 2D and 3D map displays (I'm more than happy with 2D representations, but all of the competition does 3D, so why not Sanyo?). No mention of TTS (Text To Speech) road name announcements, but I'm not a great fan of mispronounced streets anyway.
It provides an MP3 player on board, is battery equipped and is Blutetooth equipped, so you can link it with your cellphone.
It does have a memory slot, but it is filled with a supplied 1 Gig SD card that holds the maps - and that's part of the problem - only 1.4 million POI and no room for anything else. Yes, you can probably put in a larger card, but that won't help with sparse mapping.
Also, the 4" display sounds nice, but I am willing to wager that at the asking price it won't be sunlight readable. It also won't be waterproof.
That battery is good for about 3 hours of run time (Nuvi 350 runs for 8). It seems a bit too large to stick in your shirt pocket (Nuvi 350 fits fine) and so on.
It'll be interesting to see just how fast it is when they eventually do release it.
This market requires keeping in touch with the clients for map updates and such - Sanyo is a consumer manufacturer of the 'sell and forget about it' variety. So they are not likely to have the support in place nor will they likely invest in map updates like Garmin has.
But I don't think that this device offers any serious competition to Garmin, except for pricing - and only when comparing it to a Nuvi - but then Garmin offer several models at this price point and below. So what's the great breakthrough?
