I saw the SPOT at CES this past year and thought it was pretty cool if a little too expensive for the service. I have no idea how much it costs to send data over a satellite but I am sure it is not cheap. I recently found out about a promotion for FireEagle users where you can buy a SPOT GPS tracker for $150 with one year of service for free so I bought one. When I got the package I was impressed with the beautiful, easy to open packaging - not as nice as Apple boxes that I feel compelled to hang on to for some reason - but still very nice. Inside the box is a space filling box with a large rubber band holding the instruction manual. Cool the rubber band must be the lanyard or something. On a whim a tried putting everything inside the filler box and everything fits inside it - hmm. are they trying to win an award for packaging? why not just use the smaller box? The unit looks nice and tough with over-molded rubber providing a grip and sealing the two halves of the housing. The battery door is held on with two machined screws that have turning rings attached - no screw driver needed. Nothing says rugged quality more than panel fasteners like these, they remind me of military equipment. I get the necessary unit info from inside the battery compartment and head to the web to create my account. Although I have a code which gets me a free years worth of service I still need to enter a credit card. Not that big of a deal - I am a special case - but it is the first of what will become numerous annoyances.
After creating an account I am stepped through setting-up a "message profile" to configure the messages sent from your messenger to your SPOTteam members.
Huh?
I just want my new GPS to send my location to a phone or an email. Who are these SPOTteam members, employees of SPOT? No, it turns out that is their cute name for the people who you send messages to. The confusion is due to some overly imaginative programmer who has burdened almost everyone who has one SPOT with the confusing ability to have multiple "message profiles" that can be assigned to multiple SPOTS. Why not hide this feature away under a button or tab labeled "more than one SPOT?" or "saved contacts?" So I think I get that all set-up with my own phone number just to check. I turn the device on and press the OK button and both LEDs start blinking green in sync. That looks good, time to break out the manual and see what it means.

To know if a message got sent or not you have to stare at the device for 4-5 minutes watching for the OK LED to either stay green for 5 seconds or flash out of sync with the power LED. After that 5 second period the OK LED gives no indication of whether it was able to get a GPS fix or not. That is not acceptable, there are three states a GPS tracking device can be in: Trying to get a fix, successfully got and sent a fix, or not able to get a fix. Unless I stare at the LED's non-stop I can't tell what state the device is in. The SPOT also has two states: ON or tracking. I tried to put mine into tracking mode by holding down the OK button for 5 seconds but there is no way to tell if I was successful. In tracking mode the OK LED blinks in sync with the power LED, the exact same as if the device is waiting to send OK message (which the instruction manual says can take 20 minutes.) It gets worse, to turn off tracking you do the exact same thing you do to turn it on, hold the OK button for 5 seconds. When I did this my OK LED flashed red for 5 seconds - I have no idea what that means, there is no mention of it in the instruction book.

I am starting to get annoyed so some of the below are nits I would have forgiven if SPOT hadn't already burned through my good-will toward them.

Web pages are slow to load (login takes 8-10 seconds,) on one occasion got a Tomcat error page.

I finally did get an email message:

SPOT Check OK.
ESN:0-7407112
Latitude:42.2662
Longitude:-71.0886
Nearest Location:not known
Distance:not known
Time:09/12/2008 13:27:53 (London/GMT)
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=42.2662,-71.0886&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1


Why they weren't able to reverse geocode the location I have no idea since I was in a town and only 8 miles from Boston, MA. Why send the ESN and not the name I have assigned to the device? You have my credit card billig address, why not set my time zone to that address instead of GMT?

The text message to a phone is even worse, no ESN or name is sent and there is no attempt and reverse geocoding the location. No link to a map, just what are, to most people. two almost meaningless numbers - the latitude and longitude.

You can set-up a public web page that shows your location, the URL of my public display page is:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0q5f1Ibh8LoGpjimasHFQ9XnJq6uxDTZ7
Yeah, that is easy to remember and tell someone before you go - ever heard of tinyurl.com?

At the bottom of the we page they have this disclaimer taking up 5% of the screen real estate
"All Spot and Spot web site design, text, graphics, and the selection and arrangement thereof are the copyrighted works of Spot © 2007. All rights reserved."
Thanks for the copyright lesson, don't worry I don't think anyone is going to rip-off your cluttered, confusing design.

It is obvious this product and web application were designed by engineers without any help from a user experience designer.
Here is a look at the circuit board - it seem pretty well made (click on the image for a close-up look)