I’m interested to hear why the 795 owners on here went down this route rather than Garmin Pilot (not Skydemon) on an iPad Mini or whatever.
Clearly people are voting with their wallets…
but the 795 hardware is far more primitive (thicker, heavier, slower, lower-res)
The real Q is whether it is good enough. When you get to the point where e.g. my Samsung S7 phone has about 2500 pixels on the long axis (so I would need the x40 inspection microscope at work to see them) it gets a bit pointless. In turn, the device has a poor battery life because it needs a top-end CPU to drive the graphics. And almost all consumer IT devices today have a crap battery life.
I know people take the p1ss out of me over this but this
is fully functional for European VFR and IFR, including Eurocontrol IFR 
The screen on the KMD550 is a ridiculously low 320×240.
There are certainly features I would like (airway entry etc etc) but they aren’t connected to the screen resolution.
the 795 is that it has Jepp plates rather than AIP.
For those who can afford the cost for Europe, that is a massive advantage. The AIP plates are barely readable when reduced to A5 or so – regardless of the resolution of the display device. Well, at A5, you can read them if you are young, or wear reading glasses.
There are lots of features where high screen res is very beneficial if not essential, including approach charts display, synthetic vision, rendering of raster (eg CAA/IGN) VFR charts, display of long flight plans, scratch pad, SafeTaxi, etc.
Not sure what the 795 battery life is but two iPad Minis will cover you for an 8 hour flight so I don’t see this as a factor.
Actually, if Garmin made a very high end piece of hardware that ran Garmin Pilot and was as capable as an iPad Mini, had the same screen res, was similar in thickness, etc but was a bit robust, I would move over to it. But as @Finners has said, the Garmin stuff is just consumer grade hardware now anyway, nothing special, so I don’t see the benefit over Apple’s kit.
Peter wrote:
is fully functional for European VFR and IFR, including Eurocontrol IFR The screen on the KMD550 is a ridiculously low 320×240.
The fact that it is fully functional does not mean that it is ideal. If I had such a setup I would not exchange it on the basis of screen resolution alone, but for me to pay for anything new in 2016 with less than 200 – 250 ppi? No way…
Peter wrote:
In turn, the device has a poor battery life because it needs a top-end CPU to drive the graphics. And almost all consumer IT devices today have a crap battery life.
My iPad will last a good 5 hours with the screen on, GPS on, radios on (and it’s 3 years old at this point), so battery life really isn’t a concern. In any case it’s connected to USB power in the aircraft, I’m only going to need the battery if the USB adaptor fails or if the electrical system goes down, and 5 hours is about an hour more than my full fuel endurance.
JnsV wrote:
The fact that it is fully functional does not mean that it is ideal
Indeed. A map and a compass are fully functional items for VFR, and it doesn’t look they are going away anytime soon. A proprietary system (a Garmin GPS/map system) is probably the least ideal thing one can think of, because it is proprietary. The same can be said with ordinary glass systems also, far from ideal from a user perspective because things are changing too fast, and only consumer products are able to include these changes (or rather, they it’s the consumer products that’s changing, developing).
In a light aircraft there are no special features that are necessary (like there is in hiking, marine and MC), so a consumer product (a tablet) will deliver the best overall performance. A slightly more “rugged” tablet would be nice though, maybe with a CAN bus, wifi and 4G. A slightly rugged tablet, but still consumer grade, and with a CAN bus could wipe most of today’s EFIS’es off the arena in a moment.
What is IMHO needed is a tablet which
There have been tablets, not actually milspec but the tougher ones sold into the point-of-sale, warehousing and parcel delivery whoops I meant “logistics” 
market which meet the above requirements (google on Sumo for example – Jeppesen had some tie-up with them via a German dealer, shown at EDNY a while ago) but obviously none of them are IOS and last time I looked none were Android. I nearly bought one a few years back which was totally awesome but running winXP so a problem for today’s popular apps, as well as having a near-useless touch functionality (same comment for win8 tablets e.g. Lenovo).
Peter wrote:
Well, at A5, you can read them if you are young, or wear reading glasses.
which means touch screen must not be disabled.
alioth wrote:
My iPad will last a good 5 hours
Or using zoom on tablet which means touch screen must not be disabled.
Which means you have to fiddle around with it, and can’t see the whole plate in one go.
ortac wrote:
I’m interested to hear why the 795 owners on here went down this route rather than Garmin Pilot (not Skydemon) on an iPad Mini or whatever.
Connectivity is one thing. Especially combined with a dock, it makes a neat solution. There is Flight Stream nowadays, but it’s not as versatile. I had temperature related issues with iPads – on the high side, it’s partially because I fly machines without “ceiling” (canopy all around) which means pretty much no shade. I would have to create a mount with a shield which should also improve glare.
Fortunately, there are semi-rugged and even rugged tablets on the market. Unfortunately, there is almost no aviation related software for them because they’re not made by Apple. There you can get good, mate screens, good protection against impact, water, dust, better tolerance of higher and lower temperatures, USB ports (or Ethernet, RS232 or whatever for updating avionics), memory card readers, even hot-swappable batteries. Yes, they’re bulkier, heavier, way more expensive, but I prefer them in the field. I prefer iPads at home (or in the office).
I like a good resolution (I had a 15.4" notebook with 1920×1200 in about 2005-2006) but these days, I’m often not interested in the state of the art, especially in portable devices – simply because of the processing power required and the associated consumption and heat. Then again, I’m not interested in carrying around an emergency paddle masquerading as a mobile phone. I’m also not after the thinnest and lightest of devices – I always liked thin and light, but too much is too much. I don’t care for the trade-offs Apple makes in MacBook Pros for example. For me, it’s not worth the last millimeter. Priorities for consumer hardware are simply different from mine.
Peter wrote:
Which means you have to fiddle around with it, and can’t see the whole plate in one go.
Just for a quick glance to particular frequency or DME distance Actually, you don’t need to see whole plate in one go all the time. Once you’re done with frequencies, you’re focused on path e.g. headings, altitudes and distances.
