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product review - GPS navigation
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 12:44 pmForestfen wanted to have a GPS navigation unit for her car, especially for finding her way around when looking at houses as part of her real estate business. So I bought her a Pharos Drive GPS 150. It cost $150 at Newegg.com and has a $50 rebate.
I set it up yesterday and tested it on a trip. It seems to work fairly well for the price.
Entry is via touch screen, but that part does not always work well. I sometimes need to tap several times for my touch to be recognized, even though the unit makes the clicky sound each time I tap. I'm not sure if this is a problem in general with the product, or just on this particular unit. Touch-screen seemed like a plus at first, but now I think I'd prefer buttons.
You can enter your destination, and it will calculate a route and give you voice prompts as you travel. The voice prompts are in a cool-sounding female electronic voice. If you don't make a turn when prompted, it automatically recalculates the route and continues giving prompts based on the new route. You can specify that you want the "shortest" route or the "quickest" route. When navigating an area you are familiar with, you may notice that the calculated routes often aren't the ones you would normally choose on your own, but I suppose that would be the case with any GPS product.
It did one time choose a route that included a road which was blocked off. But upon driving past the blocked-off road, it came up with a new route. When recalculating routes, not once did it say to turn around and go back the other way - it seems to be programmed to try to find the best route without doing a U-turn, and without going back to the roads that you by-passed.
When one road going straight ahead becomes another road with a different name, the unit does not mention this in the route details. This can take getting used to. For example, it said to turn right on a particular road and drive 15 miles. The road was much shorter than that. However, the 15 miles were including the next road that this one ran into, as well as part of the highway that the next road ran into.
Yesterday I was able to get a GPS signal from inside the house next to the windows. Today it is cloudy, and I was not able to get a signal until going outside, and even then it took a few minutes.
I set it up yesterday and tested it on a trip. It seems to work fairly well for the price.
Entry is via touch screen, but that part does not always work well. I sometimes need to tap several times for my touch to be recognized, even though the unit makes the clicky sound each time I tap. I'm not sure if this is a problem in general with the product, or just on this particular unit. Touch-screen seemed like a plus at first, but now I think I'd prefer buttons.
You can enter your destination, and it will calculate a route and give you voice prompts as you travel. The voice prompts are in a cool-sounding female electronic voice. If you don't make a turn when prompted, it automatically recalculates the route and continues giving prompts based on the new route. You can specify that you want the "shortest" route or the "quickest" route. When navigating an area you are familiar with, you may notice that the calculated routes often aren't the ones you would normally choose on your own, but I suppose that would be the case with any GPS product.
It did one time choose a route that included a road which was blocked off. But upon driving past the blocked-off road, it came up with a new route. When recalculating routes, not once did it say to turn around and go back the other way - it seems to be programmed to try to find the best route without doing a U-turn, and without going back to the roads that you by-passed.
When one road going straight ahead becomes another road with a different name, the unit does not mention this in the route details. This can take getting used to. For example, it said to turn right on a particular road and drive 15 miles. The road was much shorter than that. However, the 15 miles were including the next road that this one ran into, as well as part of the highway that the next road ran into.
Yesterday I was able to get a GPS signal from inside the house next to the windows. Today it is cloudy, and I was not able to get a signal until going outside, and even then it took a few minutes.