Any Chance?



Gary

If some people think the PC version is too expensive, what are they going to think of the price of the potential iPad version given that we'll need to spend six months developing it and then hand 30% of our revenue to Apple?

I take your point there Tim, especially on the 30% to Apple!! But the fact is that the I-Things have munched very quickly into a large chunk of the market. Whilst I live and fly in the UK, I work in the Far East, so travel quite a lot. Over the past two years it seems that everyone everywhere I go, seems to have an I-Phone. In Singapore the entire business community wouldn't be without it. Even my wife is now going to trade her old Orange mobile in for an I-Phone (She already has a Blackberry). So my thinking is, that if/when someone does come out with a Flight Navigational Application for the I-PAD it's going to sell like hot cakes and frankly I think it's just a matter of time before someone does.



I think the reason people in the flying club think it's expensive is because they don't appreciate the cost of SOFTWARE as opposed to the sale of a device already loaded with the software and offering a simple updating system. I bought a 5" touchscreen GPS unit on Ebay from China for £46 plus postage. After a fair degree of fiddling around with it (the very inadequate instructions were all in Chinese anyway!) I have been able to get it to work very well with my purchased copy of SkyDemon Flight. Most people in my flying club wouldn't ever think about doing this, much prefering to buy a complete unit and go from there.

I understand that you are soon going to offer GPS units loaded with "Flight" and if this comes with a disk to load "Plan" on their own PC or laptop and is competitively priced compared to the other GPS sellers it should sell very well because it is far and away the best Flight Planning and Navigational software out there at the moment.



Just a bit of feedback.

I have flown a number of Navexes now with my 5" Chinese GPS fitted with its suction device to the glass on the second Altimeter and plugged into the cigarette lighter. I found the Yellow A/C marker got lost on the same coloured Towns and Cities. I have now loaded up the latest version and changed it to Black and have yet to test it.

I found that the Aircraft marker did not reset when it flew off the edge of the screen and I had to drag the map across to continue navigation. This was very difficult in the bumpy conditions I was experienceing in my Piper Arrow at 3000ft. I understand this should work better in the new version of "flight".

My screen is quite good, but could do with being a bit better to see in bright conditions and I think this is something to bear in mind when you decide what GPS units to pair your software with for sale as a complete unit.

Lastly I feel that 5" is really the minimum size for a moving map unit in a light aircraft but 7" would be that much better.