I recently purchased the IDC Personal Pocket GPS LocatorIDC Ecco Intelligent Digital Compass Personal Pocket GPS Locator for my elderly mother who has occaionally lost track of the location of her parked car (she lives in one of the boroughs of New York City, and parks on the street). I liked the simplicity and compact nature of the device - the device slips on to your key chain and there are no complex maps or multiple options - just lock your location, do your shopping, then hit the "Return" button to pop up an arrow which shows you which way to walk and counts down the distance as you approach your car.
However in my actual testing I found deficiencies that will result in my returning this product. New York was bitter cold and windy during my recent visit. I tried setting the location of the car from within the car. However although the device indicated "READY", the location that was locked did not seem to be accurate and the car was not properly found when we hit "RETURN". On another occasion, as we exited a store and I hit "RETURN", the compass did not seem to work and indeed had to be recalibrated - only 3 days after I had initially calibrated it, and for no apparent reason.
Thus, for a tech savy adult, but with poor directional skills, this device might work out, but for an elderly adult with poor or virutally non-existent technical knowledge, this device is not quite ready for use. The time to lock position in the area where I tested this was about 1 - 2 minutes (a NYC street with 1 - 3 story family homes), which seemed a little long, and not convenient during winter use. Furthermore, as noted above, the compass calibration failed and the calibration procedure is simply too complex for the non-technical elderly to understand.Get more detail about
IDC Ecco Intelligent Digital Compass Personal Pocket GPS Locator.
