Insignia CNV10/CNV20 Full Review
Update: The CNV-10 and CNV-20 are on sale for $99 and $149 respectively; are they worth it? Maybe.......
BestBuy brought the Insignia CNV10/CNV-20 Internet Connected GPS to the market a few weeks ago as the second Internet connected GPS to hit the US market. There are others out there, the first one being the Dash Express, an internet connected GPS that also connects via WiFi to utilize the cheaper and high bandwidth to update maps while sitting in your garage. Magellan has talked for almost a year about having the Magellan 5340+GPRS come to market (and recently announced that they are suspending development on it), as has Garmin with their Nuvifone. Finally, TomTom has hit the market in Europe with their HD designated units that have a SIM chip in the power cord, connecting their units to the internet; if we're lucky, it might even hit the shelves in the US. OK - you get the picture, everyone is thinking about one, but in the end, Dash was here and now Insignia, but not all the others.
The Insignia CNV10 is the standard screen unit (3.5-inch) while the CNV20 is the widescreen unit on the market that offers the ability to search via Google (nearly infinite Points of Interest as a result, right?), send an address to your unit over the airwaves from Google Maps, but most importantly get high quality, high definition traffic updates to the unit. The higher bandwidth allows for a finer resolution in theory of the current traffic situations versus the low bandwidth TMC system that goes over the FM airwaves. Dash takes this to the next level by making the units separate traffic probes, reporting back the situation that you are in, and if you are stuck, it will warn other Dash units that the traffic is bad at your current position.
The Insignia CNV10/CNV20 units come with a 1-year subscription to the cellular network, which gives you an answer to why the fairly basic 3.5-inch screened unit costs $399; a similar, non-connected Garmin costs under $200, while the Dash Express costs $299 + the cellular plan of about $12 per month. See my Unboxing of the Insignia CNV10 for more product shots.
So, doe the Insignia CNV10/CNV20 offer these advanced features in an easy to use format? Did it keep me out of the traffic commuting around Boston? Read on......
See our Unboxing of the CNV-10 for more information and pictures on the unit.
Design
Overall, the Insignia CNV10 is nothing special in terms of aesthetics; flat GPS with an unremarkable mount. It uses a coiled power cord, which is unfortunate. It keeps the cord coiled which prevents it from dangling on the floor of my car, but instead strings it across the front of my radio adding a little frustration to my day. The CNV10 slips into the mount with power connection pins at the bottom of the unit, allowing you to power the mount or the unit itself. the mount is a cam lever action which is easy to use and sturdy.
Interface
The interface is not my favorite and is reminiscent of an old Atari with blocky graphical items and a somewhat unresponsive touchscreen. They start things out right with a "Go To" and "Map" pair of buttons on the splash screen, conjuring up the simple Garmin interface that offer up similar simple choices.
Go To - You can program in your Home address, search for addresses, do a Google Search - which replaces the typical Points of Interest search, hit a list of favorites, recent items, or simply browse through POI's offered up by a Google search.
As I searched for items near me, I found that the Google Search was lacking results.... yes, the Google search stunk. I searched for banks in my home town, and the Insignia CNV10 came up empty, while an online search at Google Maps offered me the several that I knew about in town.... big miss. I found that it was an issue in a few other areas too, like for food and restaurants. What a disappointment.
Fuel - The Insignia is connected to Gas Buddy which can be helpful if it searches near you. The unit returns results from Gas Buddy, and can present results sortable by Distance, A-Z and by price. I found it fairly accurate, but it relies on Gas Buddy for data, which has a system of crowd sourcing the gas quotes; I saw some stations around me with data that was less than 6 hours old and some stations with data that was over 5 days old. The Gas Buddy feed showed prices for regular, and premium as well as a note on how recent the data was.
Traffic and Navigation
The Insignia CNV10 is fed traffic by the deCarta system that offers up to three routes when appropriate all accounting for the traffic currently on the routes. Like the Dash system, the routes show up up with the milage and the expected time that the trip will take, taking into account the current traffic situations. I used the unit to travel into Boston from my house on weekday commutes, and found the estimates reasonable given the time of day. Good job. By tapping one of the options, you start navigating along the route. That's where all the goodness stops.
The route into Boston is about 35 miles long and during rush hour it will take about 60 - 75 minutes on a normal day with normal congestion levels. The routing options accurately predicted that, but when I started navigating, the unit indicated that it would magically take 37 minutes to get to Boston.... like it did NOT account for the traffic. Whoops. It's like the traffic engine and the readout on the GPS screen weren't even connected.
Next up - "Checking Traffic" - The traffic up the Southeast Expressway into Boston can change quickly as you move through the rush hour, and the handful of times that the Insignia CNV10 checked for traffic it didn't find much. That's all well an good if it was 3AM on a wednesday morning, but it was the height of the rush hour. I was sitting dead stopped while the little indicator showed a green light and said "No Congestion Reported" - see the picture and notice the car dead stopped ahead of me! This was not some obscure traffic jam, it was a 5 mile back-up that crawled along. I am sitting on a four lane highway in bumper to bumper traffic - there's plenty of congestion to report..... Other than the obvious miss on the congestion, the unit seemed to not check traffic status very frequently, so I only saw it check a couple of times in the hour+ commute time, I would think that it would need to check in every 5 minutes or so.
"No Congestion Reported" - Note the Green Light on the Insignia signaling no traffic issues, while I was at a dead stop in traffic on one of Boston's most heavily traveled highways in the morning rush hour.
Navigation - If you notice in the picture above, the Insignia CNV10 was routing me to the Airport HOV lane - I was only one person in the car; another big miss - while it may be the fastest way to the airport, I would get a ticket for using that lane while riding alone. The unit should be able to account for that lane restriction somehow. You can avoid UTurns, Highways, Toll Roads, or Ferries in the settings menu.
Normal navigation around town was decent, and verbal commands were OK, not great; more on the computer side versus the normal human voice side of things.
As I did in my initial impressions and review post for the unboxing, I was able to send addresses to the unit easily and quickly from Google Maps. They land in the "Favorites" section and allow you to navigate to locations that you pick off the web while browsing on any computer.
Settings
You are able to change the map view, set the colors of the screen to a Day/Night or Auto switching view, set brightness, pick various car icons (including a Geek Squad VW Bug), set time, language, and set your unit's email address so that you can email addresses to it via Google Maps. All fairly normal, but nothing impressive or deficient.
Review Summary
The promise of a connected GPS is really pretty impressive and exciting; incredible traffic awareness, quick searches that bring in the ever changing world to your dashboard, and useful information on things like Gas prices. The problem is that the Insignia CNV10/CNV20 don't really deliver any of the benefits of having a connected device, and shows its second tier nature through a poorly executed plumbing of the system to what may be a very good underlying deCarta system. The deCarta system showed fairly accurate travel times through traffic, but never seemed to plug that information back into the actual GPS interface thus rendering the advanced traffic awareness, well pretty useless. Just in case you thought things couldn't get worse, the touchscreen was sometimes unresponsive, clicking and clicking as I tapped it, but never responding. How bad is that?
In the end, I see no good reason at this point to invest in an Insignia CNV10 or CNV20 - the interface is rough the navigation is decent, and the connected nature of it fails to deliver. It's not the absolute worst GPS I have ever seen, but at $399, it's about the worst value I have seen in a GPS. Don't waste your money; I'll be bringing it back and paying the 15% re-stocking fees.
UPDATE: I returned the Insignia CNV10 and was NOT charged a re-stocking fee. When asked "Is there anything wrong with this?", I replied, "It doesn't work like it says on the box, the traffic and connected search don't work as promised." No problem getting my full refund on the Insignia GPS Return.
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Posted by Scott Martin at November 9, 2008 10:54 PM
Renard,
At it's core, the Insignia is a connected device that has flaws, and shows bad design and execution. I can't recommend it as a device that delivers connected capabilities reliably.
The most galling examples were that it totally missed bumper to bumper traffic that should have been an easy one with its connected nature (see the picture in the review). The other fact was that the traffic window results seemed totally disconnected from the trip duration quotes. Bad traffic on the map; ETA that assumes no traffic - just doesn't add up.
Pile on top of that the misses in trying to find businesses in my home town - banks etc. and the misses on gas stations, it all added up to a lack of trust on my part in the capabilities. If you can't trust a GPS, then it doesn't deliver the benefits at the most basic level.
At the time of the review the unit was $399; and my hunch is that BestBuy figured out that they are never going to sell at that level, and that the fire sale may be the swan song of the units.
If one's expectations are that you can have a device with a second rate interface design and occasional good performance on connected features for $149, or $99 for the CNV-20 and CNV-10, respectively, awesome. Go for it; really. I think that the Insignia units can work well against those expectations.
My concern is really with those folks who expect a device to work as well as a Garmin or a TomTom, and deliver consistently as they drive through traffic day in and day out; I just didn't see it living up to those expectations.
My hope is that Insignia sees potential and can fix many of the issues I saw, with software updates. Not sure of their commitment to this and their arrangement with the designer/manufacturer of the device.
As a reminder, the TeleNav Shotgun is fresh on the market, and I have been using it with some positive results, but with some faults too. They seem interested in investing behind it and seem to have a stream of improvements planned. I'll be posting more on this unit in the new year after I have used it a bit more.
Good luck with the Insignia, and keep your eye out for updates. Let us know how it performs and if any of the issues I saw are remedied; that would be great!
-Scott
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