The Sapphire GPS Mouse is powered by the SiRF Star II chipset. The unit is capable of connecting up to a maximum of 12 GPS satellites and has a low power consumption.
The bottom of the Sapphire has a super-cohesive magnet, which allows you to place the unit on your car roof. One thing the unit is lacking is some sort of suction cup to install the unit onto a car's dash, though a piece of sticky tape should suffice.
One of the bigger pluses going for the Sapphire is the huge selection of cable types available to connect to computers and PDA devices. In the above picture we have the USB cable type so we can use it with a laptop computer. You can also go with a PS/2 style serial plug for your computer also. As for PDA's most popular brands such as iPaq, Casio, Palm, Toshiba, etc are available.
To test the unit out we performed some TTFF (Time To First Fix) benchmarks. As well as using the unit in a car for a week.
For comparison we added the results from a Garmen eTrex and Magellan SporTrak to the mix.
Time To First Fix
Model:
cold test 1
cold test 2
cold test 3
cold test Avg
Garmin eTrex:
37 sec
42 sec
39 sec
39.33 sec
Magellan SporTrak:
35 sec
45 sec
39 sec
39.66 sec
Royaltek Sapphire:
58 sec sec
39 sec
49 sec
48.66 sec
Well as you can see from the results the Sapphire was not the fastest of our GPS's tested, but the results are pretty good anyways.
When it came to keeping a lock on position we only lost a fix once over a seven day period of use.
Another thing to note if you're into war driving, is the Sapphire works great with Netstumbler. The Sapphire will make it easy for you to plot access points on maps with Netstumbler and your favorite mapping software.
The Royaltek Sapphire GPS is a nice attractive little unit. TTFF is a little slower than some other units, but not by that much and besides the Sapphire is extremely affordable at around $105 US!
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