Cobra Electronics 7700 PRO GPS

Well, I installed the update tonight. I don't know what will be different.

I possibly reset something. (before the update) Now when I am going down the road the map looks different.


I was coming down I-40 in TN going East. I looked at my fuel finder book and saw a Pilot at MM 85. Bebe said it was at the 87. It was at the 85.

Lots of updates will be needed with the Pilot/Flying J merger. Some of the Pilots are now Love's. One I know for sure is the Pilot in Biloxi MS is now a Love's.

 

the 7700 is about a year out of date on its canadian maps put in a street in aurora ontario name is don hillock dr its south of wellington st e and runs east of leslie st
this road is on all the map books ie map quest google it was built about a year and a half ago there are many more roads missing the 7700 needs a serious map update
come on cobra its time to catch up with other gps units my $60 magellan even shows the road and ive had that for 18 months

 

I went to apply for a job in downtown Nashville. It wanted to drag me throught the middle of town and through all kinds stop lights. I just looped around the center of town and got off 2 blocks from the place.

It was set on the quickest route.

 

Brian is there a way I can do a swap from the 7700 pro to the newer model.

 

Hi Brian,

I'm new to this forum, but have read most of the entries in this thread. I purchased a 7700 a month ago after pretty extensive research primarily as a result of the information in this thread.

I'll happy to give you some straight, non-emotional technical feedback on this gadget, if you like, in the hope that Cobra will use it to make significant improvements to a promising tool.

You mentioned there have been no reports of the device locking up. Here's how to make it reliably freeze:

Enter a destination far from your present location and ask it to list points of interest along your route. If there are multiple locations, like rest areas or travel centers, the unit will reliably freeze, probably due to buffer overload.

This is very frustrating to me (and I'm sure others) because the only way to fix the problem is to turn the unit off and on. Then destination information has to be reentered from scratch because the unit doesn't save the current route. Asking the unit for Last Route doesn't work.

This effectively means I can never query the unit for POI's like rest areas or fuel stops along the route, because 1) I can't get an answer from a frozen machine, and 2) I have to reenter destination information from scratch every time I have to recover from using this feature.

The problem is poor coding because freezing from a buffer overflow should be captured (like limiting the number of POI's displayed to the first 20 or some such) in order to prevent this.

I'm a long haul trucker and I bought this unit to be able to enter a street address several states away in order to efficiently navigate to it. This repeatable freezing problem severely limits its usefulness to me.

I'll share other glitches in another post.

 

Brian,

Here's some additional thoughts/frustrations with the 7700. (By the way, I have verified from the Cobra website that I have the latest map, software updates, and databases installed.)

Background - I'm a long haul trucker. Wrong turns/missed turns are VERY expensive for a unit that costs $1.50 a mile to operate, so to be profitable it has to be driven as efficiently as possible.

With that background, I bought this unit to efficiently navigate to an address several states away. I considered the Rand McNally, the Promiler, and the NuVi, and Streets & Trips before I bought the 7700.

Some in this thread have shared they feel the technology is not ready yet. I disagree; the technology to make this unit work well is here and operating. The unit obviously knows where it is at all times, is capable of plotting a trip, warning of speed traps and dangerous locations, etc.

So, the technology and hardware is capable and operating. The problem is with poor software coding and database upkeep. Here are some of my major issues with the 7700:

The unit freezes and crashes in a predictable manner (see my previous post).

The database is obivously a car database with truck stuff grafted into it. If the 7700 is a trucker "pro" device, then why is there ANYTHING associated with a car in it? Including useless auto info needlessly clutters up the option menus and makes navigation more difficult. If you want to keep this flexibility and include useless auto stuff, then why not let the "truck" and "auto" checkboxes control whether the auto info is displayed?

There are no warnings or alerts for weigh stations while driving the route. This is inexcusable for a device marketed to commercial vehicles that are ALWAYS require to pass through weigh stations when they are open. Missing one means a very heavy fine and points against your commercial license. Again, the hardware is clearly capable of issuing warnings or cautions based on location, so it can warn of weigh stations if programed to do so. There are only a few dozen fixed data points for weight stations in all of the US, so there's no excuse not to have automatic warnings for something this important.

Unbelievably, the unit also does not announce major interstate intersections in all situations. In the city, it does a fairly good job, but outside of major metro areas it's completely silent when major intersections are approaching. For example, I-75 south approaching the origination of I-16 in Macon GA when my route required me to take I-16. There are many other examples. Maybe this behavior has something to do with what is or is not labeled as an "exit" in your database, but the result reduces the value of the unit.

Internal menu scroll bars give inconsistent results when pressed. When navigating internal menus, the big black rectangular scroll buttons on the right may or may not scroll the page. Sometimes the button actually actuates the menu item to the left instead of scrolling. This behavior results in significant confusion and wasted time trying to figure out where you are when the display changed. Do the new items newly displayed mean the menu scrolled as desired or are you now in a sub-menu that you now have to back out of? VERY frustrating.

The scroll button problem seems to be that only the little bitty white triangles are the actual button, while the surrounding black border is not associated with the button, so touching the black border actually activates the sub-menu to the left. Truckers have fat fingers! So, make the whole black button active, not just the little white triangle.

Ditto for the "back" button in the lower right hand corner!!

There are MANY other issues that I won't take the space to detail here, but most of the problems seem to stem from:
1) grafting truck info into a car database,
2) programming from an automobile mentality, rather than a professional commercial driver's world, and
3) insufficient testing to identify and wring out these problems. So, the public is doing it for Cobra in a very public manner.

The 7700 retails for $499. I bought mine at the T/A for $349. I intially considered taking it back, but decided to keep it because I think it has more going for it than against it. I think the 7700 has the capability to be a$499 machine, but I think it's a $249 machine in it's present state. I'm hoping that Cobra will invest the programming resources necessary to make the existing hardware what it has the protential to be.