I was recently given the opportunity to be one of the first GPS-bloggers to get my hands on the Columbus v900 Bluetooth Datalogger. I spent the last month with the v900, evaluating its build quality, battery performance, usability, functionality and data accuracy. The v900 is a very cool little unit, featuring a 51 channel MTK chipset, an internal 1000mAh Li-Poly battery, Bluetooth, a microSD card slot and even a built in microphone for recording and geo-tagging voice memos. It's all housed in a very tiny, very sleek stainless steel & polycarbonate shell.
Form, Design & Aesthetics
Columbus
is gaining a reputation for
exceptional industrial design
and the v900 is no exception.
The Columbus v900 is
VERY small. Sit the
v900 next to any other GPS
device on the planet and you'll
instantly appreciate the
engineering that went into
getting all its functionality
into such a small, elegant
package.
The front face of the v900 is cut from an almost mirror-like glossy black polycarbonate plastic, housing three status LEDs and a giant circular waypoint button. The jet-black front face matches up perfectly with the matte stainless-steel backplate and helps make the v900 a very solid and robust little device.
On the top edge of the device you'll find a mini-USB port & the power button, on the side: the voice-memo button and finally, on the bottom: the lanyard attachment and microSD card slot. The Columbus v900 scores major points from me for being by far the most bad-ass looking GPS datalogger on the planet, hands down
Features & Functionality
Looks may be the Columbus v900's strong-point, but functionality is where it really counts -and sadly, this is where the v900 looses a few key points. Let's begin with what's missing; the v900 has two major faults. The one and only way to download your data from the (max 2Gb) microSD card is by ejecting it and plugging it into a card reader on your computer. It doesn't download over Bluetooth, but more surprisingly it doesn't even download over USB! Big miss here, Columbus!!! This is by far the biggest “oops” that should be at the top of the list for a 2.0 release of the v900.
The next major oops for the Columbus v900 is its non-standard log file format. The v900 saves its log files in a modified universal CSV format, making it illegible to both GPSbabel and GPSVisualizer. You have to convert the CSV files to KML format using the TimeAlbum software provided before use in GPSbabel. (if anyone knows of any 3rd party conversion software that works with v900 CSV log files, please let me know) The silver lining here is that TimeAlbum is java-based, so it's cross-platform and it's surprisingly not a bad piece of software!
That's pretty much all I have to complain about regarding the v900, so with that out of the way, it's on to the good stuff...
