The Plenio VXA-3000's huge screen makes for easier viewing of the map and information and is the unit's most distinctive feature.

In general this is a good unit with plenty to like and only a few quirks.

Plenio VXA-3000 GPS Navigation Unit Small and compact, but disappointingly underfeatured
	A clean design, a huge screen, and a generally well thought out user interface make the Plenio unit attractive and easy to read and use. Part of our series on GPS - additional articles to be published in coming weeks.

The Plenio VXA-3000 offers a lot of product at a very reasonable price.  It is well suited for 'average' GPS users, but not so well suited for a 'power' GPS user, and because of its marvelously massive screen size and corresponding increase in weight, it is not quite as convenient a unit for a road warrior to travel with.

Costing little more than one third the price of a top of the line 7" screen equipped Garmin StreetPilot 7200, the Plenio unit is following the trend to greatly reduced pricing in GPS receivers, while still offering a good feature set and user interface.

Recommended for people seeking a middle of the range type unit.

Plenio VXA-3000 Overview

The Plenio VXA-3000 is an example of a 'no-name' unit sold at a price way below the prices charged by the major brand name units.  With GPS receivers becoming increasingly generic, it is now possible for companies to 'design' and build a GPS receiver using a collection of standard off-the-shelf components - a SiRF GPS receiver chip as used by almost all GPS manufacturers, one of several generic antennas, a generic display screen and other hardware components, a generic interface layered on top of a generic operating system (often Windows CE based), and map data from either Navteq or Tele Atlas.  This pretty much eliminates any need for expensive R&D on the part of the company assembling and marketing the unit, and when such companies are located in low cost areas such as, in Plenio's case, variously China, Korea and India, it is possible for the final retail price of the unit to be way below other products.

Does this provide a way to get more than you pay for?  My earlier experience with a low priced unit - the Michelin X-930 - was very disappointing.  The Plenio unit is more expensive ($369 compared to $199), and it also offers vastly more functionality, a huge screen, and an accepted industry standard interface (Smart2Go) and so I approached the Plenio unit with optimism.

Happily my optimism was more justified this time.  While not offering as complete a feature set as Garmin's StreetPilot 7200 and StreetPilot 7500 7" screen GPS units, it has the identical screen resolution (so probably uses the same screen assembly), and has a street price of $369 compared to Garmin's $1300 list price and $950 street price for their 7200.  Most normal users of a GPS unit will probably be satisfied with the slightly more limited feature set in the Plenio VXA-3000 when they consider the pricing differential between the two units.  You can buy two Plenio units and still have over $200 left in your pocket compared to the price of one Garmin StreetPilot 7200.

The Plenio VXA-3000 went on sale in or about October 2006, and - at the time of writing - remains a current unit still available for sale.  Similar units can also be found under the Maxtek name, although note that the similar seeming Maxtek MNT-7T is not the same as the VXA-3000, but instead is equivalent to an earlier less well featured and now discontinued Plenio unit, and so is not recommended as an alternative, even though it may be available for slightly less money.

Using the Unit

The first thing we do when receiving any piece of electronic equipment is to check for operating system upgrades.  Happily, this unit didn't seem to need any upgrades, because upgrading it would be non-trivial.  Although there's a tantalizing mini-USB port on the side of the unit, the manual says it is only for use in their workshop testing.  To copy a new OS to the unit, one needs to download it to one's computer, then use a special program to copy it over to a SD card (not the one with all the map data on) and then copy it from the SD card into the unit.

This is complicated, and requires both a spare SD card and also some sort of way to transfer data from your computer to the SD card.  None of this is provided with the unit.  Disappointing.

Although the software was current, there is the promise of new mapping data to be released in mid/late March, and which we're now (10 April) told will be available some time in late April.  The only update we needed was a new manual, which we downloaded off Plenio's support website, www.dvssales.com.

Like most other units using SiRF GPS chips, the unit has outstanding sensitivity to receiving GPS signals, and very quickly locked onto enough satellites to provide a location fix.

Using the unit for normal things is very simple and acceptably intuitive.  Chances are you could use the unit without needing to read the manual at all.

The unit does have some quirks and some annoying limitations.  Probably the most annoying 'feature' of the unit is its automatic zooming, combined with no display of map scale.  You never really know if the unit is showing you the next half mile, or the next 100 yards, or whatever, and the maximum zoom out setting it chooses is still way too ridiculously close in and overly detailed.  When I'm driving down the freeway at 75 mph and the next turn isn't for 50 miles, I have no interest in the map data showing surface streets within half a mile of my position - I want to see ahead to where I'm going, nearby towns and cities, and watch my progress that way.

A strange quirk is the way the unit shows altitude in yards rather than the universally accepted measure of feet, and similarly, as soon as distances reduce below a mile, it shows the distance in yards rather than in tenths of a mile.  I prefer distances in tenths of a mile, because that's what we see on our odometers and what most people are comfortable with; until getting to the last tenth of a mile or so, at which point a switch to yards is sensible.  For most of us - to be told there's a turn in 1408 yards doesn't mean as much as if the information was described as 0.8 miles.

A strangeness that we don't understand about the unit is how it estimates one's arrival time at the end of a journey.  On one occasion we went for a 72 mile drive, and during the first 65 miles of this (on the freeway) we were making very good time, averaging a speed that was, ahem, slightly over the posted speed limit.  But, notwithstanding this, the unit kept recalculating our arrival time as being later and later, even though it was obvious that even the unit's first ETA was later than when we'd arrive.

When we finally turned off the freeway, there were 7 miles remaining (of open country road with posted speed limits of 45mph and 50mph and no stop lights) and the unit was telling us it would take 24 minutes to drive these 7 miles (ie an average of 17.5 mph), a nonsense figure that was contradicted by the not quite 10 minutes it took.  Similar inconsistencies occurred on other occasions too.

There was another very bizarre issue with the unit.  It does not correctly tell you the distance to the next turn.  The distance it tells you is between 5% - 10% greater than the actual distance - for example, if your next turn is in 20 miles, it might tell you 21 or 22 miles.  How can this happen?  I don't know how, but I do know that the unit is indeed consistently wrong in measuring the distance to the next turn.

Unlike other brands, there's no way to tell the unit what types of speeds to use as averages for different road types, making the ETA information inaccurate.

Some functions on the unit weren't as easy to access as they should be - for example, changing the volume - and if you went away from some of the main navigation screens, when you returned back to them the unit had to then recalculate its route.

Recalculating directions was moderately fast, but not as quick as some units we've used, and if you went off the route, it would automatically recalculate as needed.

The unit had disappointing limitations on the number of user defined locations we could add to it, and apparently when the software was last updated, someone messed up and forgot to leave in the ability to edit or delete user programmed locations (it was present in version 3 but is not present in version 4).  This will quickly become a big problem for those of us who like to program in pre-set destinations.

On a couple of occasions the unit has displayed 'anomalous behavior' or locked up, but fortunately a simple powering off of the unit and then switching it back on again has resolved the issue both times.

Talking about powering off, every time the unit loses power (ie when you turn the ignition off) and is then powered up again, you also have to tell it where you want it to navigate to again.  This is not difficult - you use the 'recent destinations' option and your destination is top of the list - but it is a nuisance and an unnecessary hassle.

These are minor quibbles for the most part, and in general, you're likely to find the Plenio VXA-3000 easy to use and helpful to getting you where you want to be, and telling you where you currently are.

We didn't test the other features of the unit - the ability to display pictures or play audio and video files, because we felt these to be rarely used in real life, and not a key determinant in deciding whether to choose this or a competing unit.  Suffice it to say the unit offers only limited functionality with its video and image functionality.  There are very much better ways to achieve these goals.

A Possible Problem with its Large Size?

The unit is fairly prominently visible from outside the car when mounted on your dash.

It may just have been a coincidence, but after driving around with the unit on my Landrover's dash for two months, one early evening, while it was still broad daylight outside, thieves smashed the driver's side window of the vehicle, reached in, and stole both the GPS unit and a semi-concealed satellite radio receiver as well.  This was in the car park of a large suburban shopping mall in a fairly good neighborhood (Bellevue, WA), and a place I've parked cars in without a single problem for 22 years prior to now.

Was the sight of the large screen Plexio GPS unit a temptation that encouraged the thieves to break in to my car?  I don't know, but suspect it may have been.

The Bottom Line

The Plenio VXA-3000 is a good unit.  There's nothing spectacularly great about it, but while far from perfect in all respects, happily there's nothing spectacularly bad about it either.

Its most distinctive feature is its huge screen.  What a shame the large size wasn't matched by a high resolution, but even with an underachieving 234 x 480 pixel resolution it offers, it gives you a very much larger map and lettering, making it much easier to read from the sort of distances typically found in your car.

Its huge screen does reduce its portability somewhat - it is necessarily larger and heavier than smaller screened units.  But as a semi-permanently affixed unit in your main driving vehicle, these issues are not important.  And while the unit is large, we managed to fit it into the very small dash/windshield area of our Jaguar XJS convertible as well as with larger vehicles.

There are better units out there, for sure, but to get appreciable improvement in functionality, you're looking at about twice the cost, making this both a good quality unit and a great value.

Recommended for 'ordinary' rather than 'power' or 'road warrior' type GPS users.

Currently the lowest price is on Costco.com.  If you're not a Costco member, the next best price seems to be on Amazon.

Feature Analysis
 

Read more in the GPS articles series

See the links at the top right of the page to visit other articles in our GPS series.

If so, please donate to keep the website free and fund the addition of more articles like this. Any help is most appreciated - simply click below to securely send a contribution through a credit card and Paypal.

Originally published 13 April 2007, last update 21 Jul 2020

You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.