Digital Trends

Nextar I4-BC

October 13th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Setup

Given the somewhat intimidating array of pieces in the box, we expected the I4-BC to be a bit of a bear to set up. We weren’t entirely mistaken.

When you’re dealing with a back-up camera, there’s no “easy” way to make it work. Although you can send video signals wirelessly to the screen, the camera needs power to function, so you’re going to need to wire it up somehow.

Nextar’s solution for the system was rather clever: the included backup camera must be wired into the 12-volt lines that power a car’s reverse lights, meaning it only gets power whenever you put the car in reverse, and the display automatically switches to backup view, no button-pressing necessary. Unfortunately, these lines aren’t exactly dangling out around your license plate, so a certain amount of installation comes with the territory.

Even if your car has nooks and crannies leading to the trunk from around the license plate holder, you’ll need to snake the camera’s 12V lighting cables through them, which can be a more complex task than it sounds, depending on how tight it is. Afterwards, you’ll need to fit the cables around the corners of your trunk and tap them into the power lines for the reverse lights, using special connectors that Nextar neglects to actually include. We’ll admit it – we fudged the installation using an alternate 12V power source rather than permanently altering a car’s wiring for our testing. But if you plan on doing the install yourself, you’ll need to have some modest skill with your hands to route the wiring, moderate electrical skills to find the right wires to tape, and quite a bit of patience. Not sure where to even look for the wires? Shell out for a pro install and save yourself the frustration. 

The included backup camera

Build Quality

Nextar’s reputation as a budget manufacturer, and the mysteriously low price on the I4-BC, led us to expect a somewhat chintzy piece of equipment, but we found the actual display unit to be reasonably well-built. The plastics used had a cheaper feel than what we might find from a more mainstream manufacturer like TomTom, but besides the slight difference in feel, we wouldn’t say it threatened reliability or usability for the most part. The only component where cheapness really showed was in the windshield mount, which turned out to be one of the unit’s biggest downfalls. 

A Miserable Mount

Manufacturers like TomTom have perfected simple ball-and-socket windshield mounts that allow drivers to painlessly twist a GPS to just the right viewing angle easily, but Nextar’s mount looks more like a piece of equipment that fell off the space station Mir. It has a clip for creating vacuum on the suction cup after placing it, one hinge for moving it up and down, a rotating ring that does absolutely nothing, and a weak, squeaky ball joint that affords the driver only about 20 degrees of rotation in any direction. On the severely sloped windshield of a late-model Honda Civic, we couldn’t get the GPS anywhere near facing the driver without some severe finagling. Worse yet, the length and poor construction of the mount seemed to magnify vibrations of the road, turning our helpless GPS into a vibrating mess at the end of it. At the end of the day, the engineering oversights made on Nextar’s sloppy mount ended up causing more headaches than even some of the dicier internal issues. Its only redeeming value: the suction cup had excellent grip. 

Interface

In the field, Nextar’s GPS frustrated us to use due to a number of niggling issues with the software. Exercises that should have been quite easy turned out to be complex operations thanks to Nextar’s poorly designed interface.

For instance, finding a point of interest requires you to sift through a number of different categories and guess about the nature of where you’re headed before you can do any sort of search. Looking for the nearest Taco Bell? Rather than keying “TACO BELL” into a search box, you’ll have to specify that you’re looking for restaurant, scroll down to fast food, and find it in the alphabetical list.

Want to turn off the annoying ticking noise the unit makes every time you press a button? Turning down the volume all the way in the GPS setup menu will only kill the volume for spoken directions. You’ll have to crawl all the way back to a completely different setup menu to fix the button issue.

Windows CE also produced some fun errors for us as we attempted to explore the Nextar’s features, including an “illegal operation” that brought us back to the days of Windows 98. About the only feature we really liked was the itinerary planner, which made it relatively easy to add new stops to our trips, reorder them, and delete them.

The bottom line: our Nextar I4-BC just wasn’t easy to use. While you can adjust to its quirks and misplaced menu options with time, ultimately using it for day-to-day tasks turns into quite a chore, compared to more intelligently designed units.