Last year, just before a large roadtrip, I was looking at buying a GPS logger to log where we drove, but also to tag our pictures with the GSP location where it was taken.
After reading this review I decided to buy a Qstarz BT-Q1000P.
We were going to drive across the US, and we had a few two day hiking trips where access to power was not an option. I choose it for it’s build in battery, easy charger and +24 hour battery capacity. In terms of memory I was concerned about how much would be needed, but that was for us not an issue at all.
The device is small and handy – and easy to use. It has a slightly soft backing, so when it lays in the car it does not scoot around. Nice touch.
In terms of software, it comes with their own Travel Recorder 4.1 (build Apil 11, 2008), which can download the data from the logger and display it on an embedded google map page. It is nice and usefull.
I used screen shots of the page to show friends and family our progress.
However we did have two significant problems:
- Tagging pictures does not work
- The POI button
Tagging pictures does not work when using my version of the Travel Recorder the make note offset was somehow changed incorrectly. I noticed this when IMatch started to show unknown values for some special EXIF tags. Geosetter and ExifTool confirmed this for me too (and at present it looks like ExifTool can correct the “broken” images 2009-03-09: All images has been repaired using Geosetter .. phew!).
This is a major issue – mistakes happens, but not this kind.
The POI button – the red button on the frint of the device – is easy to press .. and a bit too easy. In the bag, under the stroller, I have probably been pressing down the button for a very long time .. and I now have 1000s of POI entries for a single day. That probably would not be so bad if it wasn’t because that the software goes down completely tring to work on this amount of data (click, wait 3-4 min, click …. *sigh*). Also, there are no way to delete these POIs, but one at the time!!! No way.
All in all I like the device, and I still use it, but the software (Travel Recorder) will not be tagging any of my images. What my biggest problem is that I’ve somewhat lost the trust in the companys ability to deliver quality.
If I could grade it: B-