Technical Details

• Multimedia GPS navigation system with built-in antenna
• WVGA touchscreen (800 x 480 pixels
• Includes MSN Direct receiver with free 90-day subscription to MSN Direct service
• Internal 2GB flash memory preloaded with maps for the United States and Canada
• Text-to-speech technology lets voice prompts announce road names over the built-in speaker

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Product Description

The Pioneer AVIC-F500BT on-dash navigator offers an advanced, all-in-one solution for adding large-screen navigation, multimedia capability, and hands-free calling to your vehicle ¿ without removing your factory radio. Simply mount this road-ready travel companion on your dashboard and exercise convenient control over your music, phone, and navigation.

I’ve been using the F500BT for a few weeks after using a Nuvi 760 for years. I already upgraded to Firmware 2.0. Here is how the F500BT compares to the Nuvi

Cons:
- Routing engine not as good as the Nuvi. Very prone to give U-Turns when I miss a turn even though I disabled them. Worse is that it doesn’t know if the U-turn is illegal or not. Besides the U turn issue, most routes offered are not that bad in “Economical”
- Touchscreen not very responsive. Not as good as the Nuvi.
- Not as easy to use as the Nuvi in general.
- MSN does not work unless you use a big ugly harness. You also need to connect a ebrake signal for to avoid the menus getting locked out.
- Battery life of 30mins
- Does not auto dim the screen when switching to night maps.
- Does not tell you the side of your destination. The Nuvi does.
- Only 1 TTS voice in English. Not great, but not horrible either.
- Voice recognition doesn’t work very well

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Pros:
- Large LCD screen.
- Decent maps and navigation.
- Plays video and music files from SD and flash drives.
- Relatively cheap.
Cons:
- Touch screen response is erratic.
- Text to speech (TTS) voice quality is poor.
- Voice recognition does not work particularly well.
- No photo viewer.

To start off, I am already running the new 2.0 FW. If you are not, make sure you update.

The biggest complaint that I have is overall sluggishness. Often times one touches a button, and nothing happens at all for a while. This is in stark contrast to the Garmin and TomTom units that I have, and reminds me of Windows. But my oh my this IS Windows! The unit actually runs on Windows CE… which brings us to the start up time. The unit takes a long time to start up (a “cold” boot). Since this should happen rarely, it shouldn’t have been a problem. In fact once the unit is running, pressing the power button to turn off/on the unit is almost instantaneous. However, for some mysterious reasons, the unit does decide to cold boot from time to time (see below on “cabling”).

As a GPS, the unit functions reasonably. It is not particularly fast in acquiring satellites but tolerable. The 2D maps are pretty detailed and good looking, but the orientation is fixed at pointing North as in a real map. There is no option to orient the map according to your current driving direction, as in the 3D map mode.

Despite the large screen size, some vital information (like time to destination and nearby street names etc) are rendered in font sizes far too small to my liking. My Garmin has a smaller 4.3 inch screen but the texts are a lot more readable.