Moving to Australia was my chance (read: excuse) to make another step up, this time in price range and feature set. This gorgeous Samsung was retailing for up to AUD$2,200 when I bought it, and I negotiated down quite a bit from that in Bing Lee, an Aussie store whose differentiator is that “everything’s negotiable” – it is until you reach their “floor price” of course, which is quite easy to work out.  Some of their stores even mark price tags to show if they’re already at their floor price… but I digress.  I’d venture that it’s worth every single penny.

It arrived in a fairly large box (large enough for me to climb inside and briefly recreate the excitement large boxes held for me as a child) which was exceptionally well designed. No cutting of tape or inversion of the box required – squeeze and pull out the heavy-duty plastic carrying handles, slide the top of the box off and reveal the TV. 20 minutes of peeling off blue protective film from every surface and you’re faced with a stunning polished black TV. The base was a bit of a bugger to attach, but aside from that, setup was very straightforward. The fact that the base allows you to smoothly rotate the TV to get the perfect viewing angle (e.g. I can turn it so I can watch TV while tending the BBQ outside – perfect) makes it worth the fiddling around.  Can I include a rating for the box?  I guess I can, it’s my review: Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

It tuned itself in to the bizarre selection of free-to-air channels Australia has to offer, which includes a number of HD stations. While much of the content is still dross, you can wile away a few hours marvelling at how you can see the hairs on people’s faces and how much motoGP looks like a computer game when broadcast in HD. Even the TV’s menu and interface is pretty exciting in HD – sharp, detailed icons, large smooth fonts and good use of colours make it fun to use. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Actually, HD is a bit unflattering – suddenly you can see the newsreaders’ spots under the makeup, you can see the actor’s wrinkles or the wobble in the scenery which gives away that they’re in a studio… it’s actually quite unnerving, and made me pleased I’m not a media celebrity.  The picture is frankly amazing – much greater dynamic range than I expected, managing enough brightness while maintaining good, deep blacks. Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

I’ve tried most of the inputs (3x HDMI, 2x Component, RCA, VHF) and they all work fine – the response time is clearly better than my old unit (despite being the same on paper) without the blurring or artifacting we had gotten used to – and it drives home how much of an LCD’s performance is down to the hardware and software behind the screen which processes and scales the various inputs.  I remember that even the different HDMIs offered different qualities on my old unit, while this one is completely consistent, and upscaling from 720p to 1080p is better through the TV’s circuitry than through my expensive fancy-ass upscaling DVD player which blew me away when I first used it. Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

One unknown quantity prior to purchase (I’ve read conflicting opinions on forums recently) was whether the optical out connection always outputs the sound from whatever input’s being used, regardless of whether the input is digital or analogue, stero or surround etc.  This is relevant because if you want a low-budget home theatre, the perfect situation is to find yourself a non-HDMI, audio-only amp with digital in, use the TV as your HDMI switcher and the amp to just decode and amplify the sound.  Having now connected a surround amp, I’m pleased to say all audio is neatly routed through optical, which makes everything a lot neater.

Built-in sound is also fairly outstanding versus expectations – the speakers appear to be mounted on the underside and hence are invisible, but they are plenty loud enough for our sizeable living room – they just lack the definition and spacing of a home theatre setup. [rating 3.5/5]

The only real bugbear (and this has been tested on two different buildings’ aerials) is the built-in digital TV user interface. OK, it scanned well enough, and it manages to display an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) but for some reason the EPG interface is UNBEARABLY SLOW, almost to the point of being useless.  Thankfully many people have FoxTel here, so they can disregard the built-in software, but as we only use free-to-air we’ve had to establish a few workarounds in order to browse channels. Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Basically, well done me – this is a freaking great TV.  But before I end on a rating, I forgot one very important test of any new hardware…

The emptiness test. I believe that any gadget worth its salt should feel full.  Full of circuits and batteries and capacitors and ingenious voluptuous gadgetry.  It should feel like a team of skilled and highly-paid professionals worked day and night to pack it end to end with STUFF, and put it all in a good solid box which was just the right size to keep it safe.  This TV does fall down slightly here.  It’s about a third of the weight you expect it to be, which makes you wonder why they didn’t make it even thinner (I guess the designers knew they were going to bring out the new LED ranges when they spec’d it out) and it did make me a bit sad.  However, the advantages are: 1. you’re less likely to drop it while rearranging furniture, 2: it’s easier to rotate without having to heft it around.  So I’ll give it a non-commital Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars because heavy is not always equal to awesome.

Physical design Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is a nice bit of kit! It’s thin (something like 20mm at its thickest point), tastefully coloured in matt black and silver, with a substantial metal-grilled speaker at the back and a rubberised power button on the top.  The speaker doubles as an attachment for the windscreen mount, which is compact and operates on a ball-joint so you can really adjust the positioning to allow for glare, use by passengers etc.  The matt anti-glare wide screen seems so mich bigger than the TomTom One’s, making the unit easier to use (buttons are further apart and bigger, the view of the road is much better, the on-screen QWERTY keyboard actually usable…) and also making it feel svelte and lithe rather than squat and fat.  Nice one.

The only niggles are that the powoer switch is quite hard to depress with big fingers and requires a few seconds of pressure to turn on – a bit awkward – and the mini-USB/ charger port on the bottom is seriously recessed, making it basically impossible to plug it in while it’s mounted to the screen.  I still haven’t worked out how to consistently reattach the unit to the windscreen mount, so I ruin the cool look of the device by fumbling around with it, twisting this way and that until it clicks in place.  I’m sure there’s a simple way… but I haven’t found it yet.

Versus the competition it stacks up well, though as I mentioned in the intro, the Navmans have really updated their physical and sofware design recently, so in the shop the TomTom struggles a bit to convince.

User Interface Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Same old TomTom interface.  Shows what years of tweaking and refining one UI has done – it’s basic, forgiving and most-importantly, consistent.  Generally, menu items are logically arranged, and the buttons at the bottom of the screen (“Done”, “Cancel” etc) are ever-present and as I said, forgiving if you forget what you’re doing halfway through changing the route.  The presentation of newer features like the driving break suggestions (which pop up a picnic table icon after a few hours of driving) and map corrections is great, though I can’t see how they’d work on a non-widescreen unit.

I’ve always found the “browse the map” mode a bit clunky on TomTom… the map refresh seems a lot snappier on the XL than I had on my Pocket PC (odd as the processor and memory are significantly inferior on the XL) which was one frustration, but I think the main problem is it’s just not as easy to use and read as Google Maps, which has set the standard for

Shame the interface looks so dated versus the other units in the shops, as I’m sure Navman is getting a lot more custom than it should at the moment simply because their latest UI looks like it was designed this century.  When you’re fiddling with units in the shops you have very little to go on and sadly the gorgeous physical design of the device doesn’t fully marry with iits software.

Routing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Some frustrations here, but these are mainly related to the poor quality of mapping and POIs in particular.  We had a few occasions where TomTom would refuse to route via a particular waypoint presumably because it involved going back on ourselves.  Not the end of the world, but had we not known the road map quite well, we might have thought it was telling us the route was impossible (“No route possible”). Generally its work was cut out for it in WA/ NT as there’s usually only one sealed road between points A and B, so the main irritation was when we were looking for a petrol station or rest area en-route to our destination, and would get the all-too-familiar “No POI found”.

Points of Interest quality Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

What do you need most in a part of the world where roads are straight for 50km at a time, “towns” (if you can call places with 50 inhabitants that) are 350km apart, and 150m-long roadtrains roar unstoppably past every 30 minutes?  You need to know where you can get petrol, and where you can safely and legally stop during the day and night.  What does TomTom provide?  Sporadic, inaccurate and incomplete coverage, missing both the POI and the access roads leading to them.  20 minutes spent with some local tourist literature gives you a completely accurate view of the Parking and Rest Areas in WA, so it’s inexcusable for TomTom not to include up-to-date POI – not to mention dangerous.  Poor.

Mapping quality Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

We were pretty disappoi9nted by the mapping in WA and NT. Considering there are hardly any roads out there (the Great Northern Road from Broome to Darwin, for example, is a xxxx km straight drive) you’d think companies as well-established as TomTom/ Navteq could get their act together and keep them up to date.  Despite their “latest maps guarantee” which is meant to update the built-in map from the Internet for a month after purchase, we hit far too many junctions which weren’t mapped, roads which had moved years ago and not been updated, missing rivers and bridges, and as I mentioned in the POI section, an unforgiveable lack of rest areas, parkiing areas and roadhouses.  In towns the quality was generally fine, but you don’t buy a TomTom to mavigate around towns with populations of 500.  Poor.

Summary

I’m sure when we get back to Sydney and do more driving on the East coast I’ll feel more comfortable with this purchase.  The real summary for WA and NT is: software and hardware = really great, even if the UI design feels a bit dated, POI and mapping = poor, maybe dangerously so.  Feels like half the country’s just been forgotten in their updates.

Basically, it does exactly what it says on the tin: plug it into your iPod and cigarette lighter, hit the “C” button to find a clear radio frequency, tune the car radio and it just works. We probably benefited from being in the middle of nowhere, hence having no radio stations to interfere with the TuneCast anyway, but the sound was clear, well-balanced between bass and treble (cleaper units I’ve used have tended to be a bit tinny) and very very simple to set up.

Aside from that, the unit itself feels solid, looks great (the inverted white-on-black display is clear to read and pretty cool, plus the cigarette lighter plug has a white LED on it which is a nice touch) and there are a couple of features we didn’t use, like the “PRO” settings (which seem to be some equaliser presets plus a mono mode) and the two frequency memories. We were also sad that the radio in our Wicked Campervan didn’t have RDS, otherwise apparently we’d have seen the artist and song title on the radio display, which is a innovative use of RDS.

All-in-all, while more expensive than some alternatives (e.g. my last transmitter was £3 from a computer fair, and worked OK) the Belkin excels in being intuitive, well-built and very good at what it does. Would buy again, even at that same price.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars