![]() The aera 660 will handle the porting, but it won’t do the flight plan filing. And if you also have Garmin’s GTN-type navigators and a Flight Stream Bluetooth system, you can port that flight plan right into them, also fairly easily. If your thing is to sit at the breakfast table unsociably ignoring everyone else while you plan, brief and file a flight plan, you’ve found your magic in the pilot app. Because of the bright screen, it’s easier to stab at the right icon with fewer uncommanded actions.Ĭompared straight up against Garmin’s Pilot app, the aera 660 is a mixed bag in capability. It’s a capacitive interface, not the older resistive design, so it’s just sensitive enough for scrolling and pinch scaling, without being oversensitive, as tablets sometimes are. Garmin’s execution of touchscreen control on the aera 660 is as good as we’ve seen from them. That means some display features will appear smaller, as does the typography. The tradeoff is that it’s not a 9-inch display-nor the iPhone 6S Plus 5.5-inch screen. It’s actually similar to the more expensive aera 796, which has become a staple in LSA and EAB panels.ĭepending on your cockpit and tastes, the aera 660 has an advantage over a full-size tablet or even a 9-inch display in that it yoke mounts easily and more securely without obscuring the rest of the panel. Both devices have color TFT displays with backlighting, but the 660’s screen rez is 480 by 800 pixels, three times the density of the 500 series. The 660’s overall size is just 0.2 inch wider and 0.1 inch taller than the aera 500 series, but the display is 5.08 inches on the diagonal compared to 4.3 inches for the 500 aeras. ![]() Since it does less, the aera is less susceptible to the burps, lockups and dead ends that occasionally trouble apps. Second, the aera operating system-and the physical hardware-is more robust. The first is that its display is brighter, sharper and more sunlight readable, a difference that’s obvious when the devices are placed side by side. It’s stupid large for a phone, but some buyers like the larger display.Īgainst these products, the aera has two surprising advantages, in our view. Might as well throw the iPhone 6S Plus in there, too. The 660’s overall size is between a largish smartphone like the Apple iPhone 6S and a small tablet, say the iPad mini or the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab S or the Nexus 7 or 9. aera decision is not quite so slam dunk as we imagined it would be. Has Garmin come adrift from market reality here? Can such a thing compete with tablets and phones? The short answer is yes it can and it is, but not in anything like the buying frenzy volume that we saw a decade ago when the tablet was still a lab-bench prototype.įor this article, we’re comparing the aera 660 to Garmin’s Pilot app, which we’ll use as a surrogate in general for other apps. The introduction of the $849 aera 660 in April shows that Garmin still thinks there’s a viable market for a GPS navigator that, although full featured, doesn’t run apps, play amusing games, pay at Starbucks or do a million other things that smartphones do. If smartphones and tablets have seized the high ground for cockpit navigation, Garmin showed last spring that it’s not quite ready to surrender its piece of the dedicated portable navigator market.
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