Bendix-King (by Honeywell) has been making an aggressive bid to reestablish itself as a market leader in avionics. Last year their AV8OR handheld staked a firm hold on the low-end portable GPS market. Now their AV8OR Ace is taking a swipe at the high end currently occupied by the Garmin GPSMAP 496 and 696, as we’ll as Tablet PC-based Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs) like ChartCase.
Right Size … Pretty Much
At 1.25 pounds and slightly less than eight by five inches, the Aces size is just
about right for the cockpit. We found it easy to mount with a window suction cup or yoke mount in a couple of aircraft without it blocking any critical items. Its also light and small enough to comfortably hold in your hand or lap.
The screen is seven inches diagonally, and is touch sensitive. Much of the Aces software is driven by on-screen buttons that appear when you touch the screen and disappear after a user-defined time. This keeps the interface clean and context-sensitive for easy use (with one caveat, see below). There are hard keys along one side of the unit for direct navigation, zooming in and out, cycling through the main viewing screens and getting to the top-level menu.
In addition to pushing on-screen buttons, you can drag across the screen to pan, similar to an iPhone. This is important on the Ace, because you’ll be paning around the screen a lot. We kept wishing for smaller or moved hard keys in return for just a bit more screen width (or height if you run the device in landscape orientation). Even mounted high and close to the pilots face, we found no zoom level that could display an entire approach plate without panning-although it was tantalizingly close. Viewed in the landscape orientation, the plates are wider that the paper version even at maximum zoom out, but the screen is too short to show an entire plan view. Luckily, panning by dragging your finger is easy and the image refreshes acceptably fast.
The touch screen is a bit different than your iPhone in that you need to touch and wait for just a moment before moving or lifting your finger. This is by design and, once we understood what to do, it worked we’ll without accidental button pushes. But it takes some getting used to.
The Ace comes with a slim and an extended battery. This is good because they only gave us about two and three hours respectively of use with the backlight at full brightness. We needed that brightness for the screen to be readable in direct sunlight. The built-in GPS requires no external antenna and the Ace can handle up to six simultaneous Bluetooth connections for XM weather, a Zaon traffic system and even your cell phone as a hands-free device.
Updates are done via USB, or just by removing the SD card from the Ace and popping the card into your computer.
Designed for Touch
The Ace makes good use of its touch screen when showing the moving map or charts. Press and hold on any feature and you get a pop-up showing what it is and any additional information. If its an airport, you can get even more info, including fuel prices and local attractions. This data comes through a partnership with Flight Guide and is part of your subscription. With XM weather, you can also see METARs, TAFs and other information for reporting airports.
The two main map views are a typical moving map and high-resolution scans of either low or high en route charts with the aircraft position depicted. En route