Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

I wanted to have some kind of GPS navigation on our recent trip to Nashville. Having used the “NeverLost” feature of Hertz Rental cars, I’ve come to truly love what it does for me. I can read a map but I’m not the fastest at it, and so I’ve frequently passed by some turn that I needed by the time I figured out that I did.

I first took a look at the dedicated GPS navigation systems from folks like Garmin, Magellan, etc. They offer a lot of really nice features including voice prompting, 3D maps, tons of waypoints, downloadable maps, etc. But geez, these things are stinkin’ expensive! To get that kind of system, you’re gonna pay anywhere from $500 and up. I wasn’t prepared to spend that kind of moolah, so I began to think…

DeLorme sells their StreetAtlas (tm) product, along with a small USB-powered GPS unit. Looking at the features on the box, I noted that they seemed to support pretty much everything that the dedicated units do, at a way lower cost. Of course, the implication here is that you have some kind of laptop or maybe a PocketPC. It so happens that I have a laptop that is fairly nice and so I thought that perhaps I should consider using that and StreetAtlas for our little trip. But then the thought occurred to me that I couldn’t use the laptop for the entire trip without needing to recharge the batteries a bunch of times. “Aha”, says me to me, “I should get ahold of an invertor and run the laptop from that”. Since I was at BestBuy at the time, I took a little stroll over to the computer section from the software aisle that I was in and asked if they had such a beast. Indeed they did.

So, $100.00 for the DeLorme software and $55.00 for the invertor and I’ve got myself a nice little in-car navigation system. The results? Pretty good overall.

The package lets you load both the software and the entire map database onto your machine if you have the space, which I did. That makes it nice in that you don’t have to keep the CD in the drive while it gets bounced all about your vehicle. Once it’s loaded, you have to download a small update from the Internet and once installed, you’re ready to travel. You do need to set a few preferences up regarding voice prompts, GPS details, map representation, etc. but those are really minor matters that can be decided later (of course, if you expect voice prompts, it’s probably best to configure that early on…)

It’s fairly easy to input a route by entering your start addres and your destination address or just the city. It computes a path and you’re on your way. Once it gets a fix on your current location from the GPS, it will begin voice prompting you about what your next turn will be and how far away it is. The map updates to show your progress and you can see more or less detail by choosing a zoom level. The prompts are a great thing, but I was puzzled by the fact that it will frequently begin to say something but will stop short. That happened a bunch of times. It took a little digging, but I found that you can press the F5 key to get it to repeat its current prompt at any time. You need to do that fairly often anyhow (if you’re me) because the details sometimes escape me when I’m driving.

I need to point out that my wife Lisa was good enough to bear the computer on her lap for the entire trip, so I wasn’t manipulating this thing while I drove. ‘Just wanted to get that out of the way in case you wondered…

Overall, the package worked great. I don’t think I’ll travel anywhere that I haven’t yet been without it. Here’s a summary of my experience:

Pro’s

1. Great overall application. The voice prompts are very helpful and the map details were quite good. When we stumbled off-course, it was able to re-route us using some of the most podunk little side-streets that you can imagine.

2. Fairly straightforward interface. I have to put this as both a PRO and a CON, because while it was ok to use, I think it could be better.

3. Reverse-Route planning is a nice touch. It lets you simply say that you want to return from whence you came, and the package computes that route for you.

4. “Route from current location” is nice too. It lets you start a new route from your present location, rather than having to enter a starting point directly.

5. Pretty excellent maps. Like I said, it was able to route us using some really out of the way paths.

6. It has a pretty nice “points of interest radar” that allows it to announce to you things that might be handy to know, such as gas stations, restaraunts, etc. You can configure what types of things you’re interested in and it can be made to let you know periodically. I didn’t try to do queries for things like “Italian Food”, or “Wendy’s”, etc. I’ll have to snoop around some more.

7. It has a speech-recognition feature that lets you drive the application. The vocabulary is fairly extensive and so you can do lot with it. See the “Cons” section for the downsides of this feature.

Con’s

1. The voice prompts kept terminating early. Not sure why but I imagine others can tell me.

2. The thing got confused a few times about where we were. Not sure why exactly although I’ve heard that urban areas can be particularly challenging for GPS. The net result is that there were a few occasions where we needed to drive around for a bit until it got un-confused. It always did, so once we figured out that it would recover it was less stressful to have it lost itself…

3. The user interface is a little bit clunky. Primarily you interact with it via a row of tabs at the bottom of the screen, below the map. It’s often not obvious which tab you should be looking at. Then, there are sometimes multiple buttons on a given tab that makes deciding your next move a little confusing.

4. It wasn’t clear how to get the software to plan a route from our current position. Finally, I was scrolling through a list box that displayed all of my previous starting addresses and noticed that at the very top of the list is an element that says to use the GPS position.

5. There’s very little documentation accompanying the package. You pretty much have to figure it out yourself and/or use the help system.

6. While the speech-recognition is a nice feature, it does suffer from the fact that noise in a car pretty much swamps out its value. It kept saying that the volume was too high, even when the mic volume was lowered. Plus, you still have to hit a function key before it begins recognition. That’s good in the sense that it knows when to begin listening, but it means that you have to fuss a bit with a key while you’re driving if you don’t have someone like my lovely wife to manipulate the thing.

Like I said, I like it a lot and I’ll be using it for future trips. For my ~=$160.00, I think it was a bargain when you consider the price of a dedicated unit. The thing that would have made it even better would have been to run it on some kind of handheld in order to make the physical aspect a little easier to deal with. If you want some kind of navigation system and can live with a laptop in the car and a wire running up to your dashboard, I’d say the investment would be well worth it.