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MiVue Drive Review By Leo Simpson Many readers have GPS navigation in their cars and some also have a dashcam to record the details of every trip they take. But who wants to have two devices stuck to the windscreen to provide these functions? Now you can have the two functions combined, in the Navman MiVue Drive. I have used GPS satellite navigation in my car for about the last six or seven years, mainly for long trips and especially when I am interstate. I generally don’t use it for local trips as I regard it as an unnecessary distraction. In fact, once you have travelled to a destination a couple of times, I don’t think you should need any guidance at all – you should know the way! However, I concede that GPS navigation can have benefits when you are travelling on a familiar route and that involves helping you keep tabs on speed limits and speed cameras. It can do this even if you do not have destination programmed into the unit. Avoiding one speeding fine can easily save more than double the price of a GPS unit. But this combined unit from Navman offers the dash camera/recorder as well so I looked forward to trying it out. Some people might think that having a camera running permanently while you drive is only for those who are paranoid about accidents. But no matter how careful a driver you may be, you cannot always anticipate every accident, especially those which might involve a driver ignoring a red light. 20  Silicon Chip In fact, only few days ago I was confronted by a driver turning right in front of me as he ignored a red light. I avoided a collision by braking and was so astonished that I had to check that I had not run a red light myself. And then to compound the astonishment, a similar incident occurred later in the same day! Finally, only yesterday as I drove home, I was just about to turn left (from the left lane) and the driver in the centre lane next to me also turned left, right in front of me. Are these people all on drugs? If any of these potential accidents had actually occurred, the MiVue Drive would have recorded every second, including my startled undeleted expletives! The video evidence would have completely dispelled any doubts about the accident and whose fault it was. So maybe these cameras are not for the paranoid after all – they are worthwhile insurance! Installing it The MiVue Drive looks very similar to a host of other GPS units, with a 5-inch (diagonal) screen and a couple of siliconchip.com.au Almost . . . but not quite. The turkey in the middle lane decided it would be a good idea to turn left right across my bows – if there had been an accident (just avoided!) I would have had all the evidence I needed against him/her/it. small buttons at the top. The camera lens is on the back of the unit (so it faces out through the windscreen). The unit is held in an adjustable mount which is meant to be affixed to the windscreen or top of the dashboard with the usual suction cap arrangement. . . except that I found it very awkward to find a satisfactory position which did not block my vision of the road ahead. This is partly because I am tall and because the windscreen is steeply raked (as is the case in many cars). In the end I managed to fold the mount and install the Mivue to the left of the instrument binnacle. This was OK for the GPS functions but not quite ideal for the camera/recorder as it partially obscured the camera’s wide angle view (see photo). The solution would be a much more compact mount, or at least one that does not block the camera in any configuration. Once the MiVue is mounted it needs to be connected to 12V DC via one of the car’s accessory sockets. It would be great if the cable could be better concealed rather than having it draped around the instrument binnacle and then down to the socket in the centre console. This is a problem common to all cars and would solved by having more accessible 12V DC sockets. If you have had any previous experience with GPS units such as those made by Tom-Tom, Garmin or Navman, the MiVue is certainly easy to use. When first turned on, the touch-screen is divided into eight labelled panels and you can easily find your way around most of the navigation features. And while Navman siliconchip.com.au caution against changing settings while you drive, it is quite straightforward; not that I would recommend more than a momentary button press or two when you are on the move. You have a choice of map formats and it changes to a different format when you are driving at night. Maps for daytime use typically have a light background while those at night have a dark blue background. There is much to like about the map displays – I chose the 3D perspective view. The current address you are passing on your left side is displayed in a small panel at the bottom of the screen, while the current speed limit is shown in a circle with a red border in the lower left-hand area of the screen. If you exceed the speed limit, the unit chimes and the speed display brightens and stays that way until you drop back below the limit. You can set the alarm to sound if you are 5km/h or 10km/h over the limit. The lower threshold would seem to be mandatory if you are to avoid getting caught by the myriad speed cameras around the country. If you have set your destination, the trip information is displayed in five panels down the right-hand side of the screen. Each panel measures about 16mm x 12mm which means that a larger type font could easily be used – the displayed font is simply too small when you are driving in bright sunlight and even harder to see if you are wearing sun-glasses. At more subdued light levels, the readings can be easily seen but why not make the font about 20% larger? The same comment could be applied to most of the info displayed May 2015  21 It’s quite intuitive – you really don’t need to download the 85-page manual unless you really want to! When you turn it on the next time, the last-stored location comes up (complete with speed camera symbol!) on the screen – make it bigger! Mind you, this problem of compromised visibility is common to all GPS units which attach to a steeply raked windscreen. They really need some sort of hood to restrict the amount of ambient light hitting the touch-screen. The information displayed in the above-mentioned panels is (running down the screen) arrival time, distance to destination, time (in minutes) to destination, current speed and local time. With the exception of the current speed and local time, the other readings are estimates based on typical traffic conditions and they change as your trip proceeds. Generally, for longer trips in the city and country regions, the estimates can be surprisingly accurate – within a few minutes for a trip that might last for several hours. The spoken announcements (of which several “voices” are selectable) are generally very good and they often include references easily recognised local land-marks, eg, “Turn left at the cinema” or “Turn right after the church”. In some cases, the map display will change to what looks like an actual photo of an intersection so that you can clearly recognise where you are headed. In fact, given my remarks about display visibility in bright sunlight, it must be said that most of the time the spoken instructions are really all you need. During your trip or when you arrive at your destination you may want to buy petrol, go to a restaurant, go to hospital or visit a doctor or dentist, get cash from an ATM. The MiVue Drive will find all available points of interest at just a few touches on the screen and is great boon when you are visiting an unfamiliar place. to wait for a satellite fix before the MiVue can do its job. A similar comment applies when you are driving through areas which have a very heavy tree cover or in the “canyons” of city streets with high buildings whereby the unit will lose the GPS satellites. This is something you need to be aware of with all GPS satellite navigation and it also applies when you are driving through tunnels, although most extrapolate your position and have you quite close to where it thinks you should be when you emerge. GPS receiver sensitivity When you first start your car, the GPS turns on immediately and shows the current time and the map display that was present at the conclusion of your last trip. Depending on the weather conditions (fine, raining or with heavy cloud) the unit can take up to three minutes or so before it gets a fix on the satellites and then it updates the map display, speed and other screen info. If it cannot get a fix, it displays “Acquiring GPS Signal”, as seen above. Of course, if you are driving without needing directions that is not a problem, apart from the fact that the unit will not be able to warn you about school zones or speed cameras. But if you are going to a programmed destination, you have 22  Silicon Chip Map updates One big advantage of the MiVue is that it comes with life-time free monthly map updates for Australia and New Zealand. This is a pretty straightforward process whereby you log on to the Navman website, hook up the MiVue to your computer via a USB cable and download the latest update. The update is quite large and can take quite a while but again, this general comment applies to updates for all GPS units. You can also purchase maps for any country which is handy if you want to take the unit overseas. Think about it: if you have a hire car, having a GPS and dash cam could be most useful. Dash camera Overall, I can give a general tick of approval for the MiVue when it is used for GPS navigation. It is quite intuitive to use and there is really isn’t any need to refer to the 85-page instruction manual which you can down-load from the Navman website. Now we come to the dash camera. For the most part, it works like any other dash cam, (also known as a “crash cam”, for obvious reasons!) recording to its microSD card all the time the engine is turned on or more particularly, any time there is power at the accessory socket. Our review sample did not come with the normally supplied 8GB microSD card, so I purchased a 32GB card which is the maximum it will take. You need to log on to the Navman website to check for card compatibility, as the list of approved cards is fairly limited. By the way, the MiVue also has a mini jack socket so you can plug in a rear view camera. This is a handy feature, meaning that you do not need a separate video display but there is no video recording for this function. As an aside, we can imagine that being a feature of future dash cams, siliconchip.com.au When the unit locks onto enough valid GPS satellite signals, it loads your current position and track. Here’s the difference between the daytime and night-time screens in GPS (yes, we know it says 7.06am . . .) with continuous video recording of what is happening at the front and rear of the vehicle. The MiVue camera is quoted as having a 120° wide angle and with 720p HD recording. It incorporates a 3-axis accelerometer so it continually records the G-forces on the car, as well as your speed and GPS coordinates. The MiVue breaks the video records into variable size blocks, some as small as 4MB while others can well over 1GB, for a trip which might only last ten minutes or so. So it is about 100MB a minute. Therefore a 32GB card is good for more than five hours of recording. Once the card is filled to capacity, it over-writes previous video clip unless they have been “locked”. If you have a collision that particular video sequence will automatically locked but you also have the option of locking the video recording at any time by either tapping the touch-screen sharply or pressing the small button at the top of the unit. The latter approach is trickier than it sounds; tapping the screen is much easier. So all the dash cam functions happen automatically and you normally don’t give it a thought while you are driving, unless you want to particularly store an immediate sequence where some driver has just behaved like an idiot. The really interesting aspects of the dash camera are Here’s a good idea of what we’re saying about the Navman mount obscuring a significant amount of what the camera would otherwise see out the window. The graph at the bottom of the screen is the accelerometer data from the journey. siliconchip.com.au May 2015  23 As well as the video of the last journey, the unit stores information on previous trips including dates and times. Unless you’re in an extremely well-lit area (and this road’s not too bad) night-time recordings are not all that useful! revealed when you play back the recordings. You can do this with the camera itself but it does not show the speed or other information and the small screen is not really convenient. So if you want to really see the details of a particular trip, you need to remove the microSD card and plug it into you computer. When you open its directory, you will find only two files: Default Folder.ini and Navman Player.exe. Clicking on the latter file loads a video player into you computer and then you can see all the video clips listed and you can play them at will. And as I had not used a dash camera previously, I found it to be a real eye-opener. I hasten to add that is showed my driving to be generally very conservative and that I rarely exceed the speed limit for more than a few km/h (yes, yes I am a great driver, rhubarb, rhubarb...). But to see it all unfold before you, every second of the way, is quite staggering. No only does it show your speed and the G-forces in the X, Y and Z-axes, it also includes the section of the Google map which shows your location at every point along the way. How does it do that? Apparently the Navman program accesses Google Earth and plugs in the recorded GPS coordinates to access the map. Oh, and you can also choose the satellite view if you wish. But the most staggering revelation was the accompanying audio recording. It records everything – and I mean everything: every comment, whether obscene or not, every belch, bird call, the spoken announcements of the GPS mode, wind noise if you have the window down, the radio program you were listening to, your conversation with whoever else is in the car … absolutely everything! It does not take too much though to realise that this could be major drawback. Sure, you can turn the audio down when you are playing back clips but there does not appear to be any way of preventing audio recording. So if you do decide to purchase one of these and have the dash cam going permanently, make sure you are always on your best behaviour. If you act like an idiot, the evidence will be in audio recording! One point that should be noted is that if your are driving before the unit gets a fix on the satellites, the dash camera will not record your speed or the GPS coordinates and nor will you be able to access the accompanying map Google map display during playback. We have included a number of screen grabs of the camera recordings to show the picture quality. Our assessment is that the quality is acceptable but it tends to be a little washed out and is not good enough to record number plates while driving. It will record the number plate of a vehicle which is a few metres ahead of your vehicle. If you want to have registration numbers recorded while you are driving you need a camera capable of recording in 1080p. In certain locations, the GPS display switches to a 3D image – very handy if you don’t know the area. If you’re close, you can certainly capture number plates (and other detail). But 720p is not exactly high resolution. 24  Silicon Chip Conclusion The MiVue Drive is a fascinating piece of kit, combining GPS navigation with dash camera/recorder. Ultimately, everyone will have a unit like this in their car. For further information, contact your local consumer electronics retailer or go to www.navman.com.au SC siliconchip.com.au