Review of Kapten GPS
Saturday 19th September 2009
Overview:
Three blind people and one sighted guide took Kapten for a spin and
experienced the following:
The main benefits are:
Price, size, public transit mode, FM radio and MP3 player. Voice
recognition in quiet environments.
The weaknesses are:
No look around capability, poor GPS tracking ability, insufficient
verbal prompting and incorrect route directions
The Kapten GPS unit is at first glance notably simple in its design,
a small and compact unit with well defined easy to identify buttons.
A circular key pad towards the top of the unit, encompassing up,
down, left, right and a centre key referred to as the `K` key. Below
which is a row of three buttons, dedicated to the features MP3
player, GPS and FM Radio, below the centre GPS button is also a telephone
key.
On the left side of the unit near the bottom, is the two mill head
phone jack socket and on the top right hand edge is the micro USB
charger and data port. On the right hand side near the top is the
volume control. There is also a keypad lock switch which is recessed
on the top of the unit towards the left hand side.
Kapten comes complete with every wire and connector you could need,
so there's no need to run out and buy anything else, which is a nice
touch.
Kapten has a built-in GPS receiver which is both good and bad. It is
good because the unit is small and self contained. It is bad because
the GPS receiver is outdated soon after the product is released. This
may account for some of the poor tracking we experienced.
Kapten has a built in compass but we were unable to get it to callobrate.
Features:
In addition to GPS, the Kapten has a built in FM Radio and MP3
player, together with the option to link up your blue tooth enabled
handset to the device in order that you can receive and make calls
through it. Note that your handset must also support this feature.
When calculating a route, the Kapten GPS initially requires users to
select a mode of transit for their journey, this selection can be
either made by pressing the `K` key at the time of hearing the
relevant choice, or by verbally indicating a selection when prompted
at the end of the available list. The choices of transport include
four possibilities; Pedestrian, Bicycle, Motorcycle and Car.
When selecting any of these, users must then define where they wish
to travel, the choices include; New address, favourites, last trips,
contacts, k tags, Points of Interest, visits or public transport.
Within each option there are a range of further choices to choose
from. One immediate issue is the lack of possibility to enter a
business's name or simply an area, for example; When opting to
calculate a route to a `New Address` the Kapten asks for the city
name, when choosing London, for example, the unit asks for the street
name, which doesn't help unless you know the exact address of where
you wish to go, like wise addresses without street names, for
example, tower buildings such as Canary Wharf present issues here.
The POI choices are confusing, as there are only a few obvious
choices, such as Transport and Sports Activities, however restaurants
and hotels appear nowhere to be found. The option for leisure and
culture likewise is vague and uninformative as to what fits within it.
This is where one of the biggest draw backs becomes obvious with the
Kapten. There is no option to back up a step. If you enter the wrong
sub-menu and listen to the list of options. You then have to go right
back to the start of the menu.
Kapten's POI categorizations are confusing to navigate. The range of
choices include:
Transportation: Airport, Ferry embarkation platform, Railway station,
Self service bike, public transportation, Public Service.
Leisure and Culture: Tourist attraction, Amusement park, Casino,
Cinema, Museum, theatre, zoo.
Sports activities include the usual line up of stadiums, ice rinks,
golf courses, swimming pools etc.
Public Services: Embassy, town council, library, police station,
exhibition centre, tourist office, hospital.
Useful: Shopping centre, parking garage, rent a car facility, post
office, camping ground, hotel or motel, pharmacy, ATM, vehicle repair
facility, petrol, city centre.
As previously stated, the biggest problem is that unless you know
where to look and the exact name of the type of POI, as defined by
Kapten, you have little chance of finding it without listening to the
entire menu at a very slow speed and without being able to speed up the
speech.
During the evaluation period which covered about 2 hours over the
17th and 18th of September, and an additional 3 hours of walking
around London on the 19th, we had great trouble getting the Kapten to
identify when we went off route. We could walk the opposite
direction for several hundred yards and Kapten would keep saying to
continue ahead in spite of the fact that our target turn was now
behind us. On the 10 or so times we tried this we could not get
Kapten to identify that we had gone off route and get it to
recalculate or to alert us that we were off route. GPS coverage was
good at 5 to 7 satellites according to the unit. This happend in a
wide open area in the Docklands and also near Hyde Park. When moving
around London, we had to find a very open location to gather an
initial signal lock, which took well over ten minutes.
When navigating in pedestrian mode we noted a significant additional
problem as the Kapten GPS offers very little audible feedback either
confirming you're on route or indeed off it. Every 300 or so yards
the unit would repeat the current latest instruction with a reduced
measurement to the next turn.
On several occasions, we found the Kapten GPS to be confused as to
what actual street we were on, giving instructions to turn onto the
street we were in fact on at the time, and at other times informing
us to turn onto streets which ran parallel with our current route,
technically impossible.
Kapten is meant to be used with a headset microphone. There is a
microphone in the midst of the cord which you push to talk. The voice
recognition was quite good in medium to quiet locations. On noisy
streets, the recognition was poor and the ability to hear the
earphone was nearly impossible. Although the recognition was
generally good, it was still a slow process to verbally prompt the
unit with the relevant information in order to set an address or
point of interest, much sloer than could be achieved with a keypad or
keyboard.
This being said, there's little point in being able to plot a route
based on voice input, if navigating your route makes little to no
sense, is easily misleading and is apparently unaware when you deviate
from it.
Note: an external speaker is provided with Kapten and the built-in
microphone is not as reliable as the wired microphone. It can be
unsafe for a blind person to wear headphones when walking.
Another significant draw back to the Kapten GPS was the lack of
vicinity mode or look about function. Without these features, users
are unable to adequately understand their environment and location
choices.
This missing Look Around feature is one of Kapten's major drawbacks
for a person who is blind or visually impaired, not a capability that
a product designed for the sighted would require. All accessible GPS
products designed for blind users have some sort of look around
capability.
Another major weakness, Kapten does not possess the ability to hear
the current location. It will announce the distance and direction to
your next turn in a route but it will not announce the name of the
street your on or the one you are crossing.
Kapten offers no precise turn instruction. While Kapten told us to
turn on x street, there was no mention as to whether it meant now or
in a mile.
Conclusion:
Although the low price and small size of Kapten makes it appear
attractive, Kapten offers none of the features that blind and low
vision users have come to know and require from their GPS devices
such as a look around mode and reassurance of streets and directions
along a route.
Kapten's voice prompts are clear during configuration, if not a
little tedious and slow, but those who wish to be guided through the
choices, may enjoy this simple user interface in the beginning but
perhaps not after the novelty wears off.
We have heard so many comments about how well Kapten works, we were
quite astounded at its poor tracking and lack of correct
instructions. We kept thinking there must be something we were doing
wrong but we were all experienced GPS and technology users. We could
only surmise that Kapten assumes the user can see landmarks and signs
to augment its minimal amount of verbal announcements. Without access
to visual information in one's environment, Kapten is best used as an
MP3 player and FM radio and not as a reliable GPS guidance product.
