Windows Phone Thoughts: Raising the Ante - the Pharos GPS Phone 600 Reviewed

POIs


Figure 24: The 4 "fully featured" POI categories.

As you'd expect, navigation to Points of Interest (POIs) is available as well. When you select Points of Interest from the basic menu, the 4 most commonly chosen categories are displayed: Cash, Food, Fuel and Hotel. From there, you can move to a screen where more categories are available.


Figure 25: POIs near your current location.


Figure 26: Details about a chosen POI.

From the list of available POIs, you can select one to get more information. Options include navigating to the location and, since this GPS is also a phone, calling the location. Both of these options can be very helpful when on the road.

Those conveniences aside, I found the POI implementation in Ostia to be somewhat lacking. While the primary categories of POIs are well represented, other categories offer very limited selections. For example, I selected the Hospital or Polyclinic category and specified no filter so that Ostia would display all available choices. I was rather dismayed to see that the 2 major hospitals closest to my home (both under 4 miles) were NOT displayed. The closest hospital that was displayed was almost 14 miles away. A comparison check with my copy of TomTom Navigator 6 (TTN6) on my Loox N560 showed both nearby hospitals.

Now I understand that if someone is faced with a life-threatening medical situation, you should be calling 911 instead of using a navigation program to find a hospital. But that led me to check other categories and I found that the same situation existed. For example, I chose shopping centers and a major outlet mall about 25 miles from my home was not displayed, while minor strip malls and more distant major malls were.

Pharos offers a bundle of subscription services called SmartNavigator (more on this later), and the POI Finder service did find both hospitals and the mall referenced above. But you wouldn't find those POIs without the service, and TTN6 finds them in the POIs that it includes at no extra charge.

Also, Ostia has the ability to display POIs on the map. However, it will only do in a very limited fashion for POIs in categories other than the 4 major categories (a maximum of 1 POI displayed per category), with the exception of POIS that have been downloaded from their POI Finder subscription service. By comparison, I checked TomTom and it has no such restrictions.

Further, the choice of POI categories in Ostia is comparatively limited. Categories available in TomTom that aren't available in Ostia include Places of Worship, Pharmacies, Car Dealerships and Movie Theatres, among others.

Finally, some of the POI options are rather clunky in their implementation. Both Ostia and TTN6 allow options such as finding a POI near a destination, but Ostia requires that you set up scenarios to allow it to infer what you're looking for. For example, if you have a GPS lock, you can only find POIs near you. If you want to find POIs near waypoints or destinations on a route, the route must be created but you can't have a GPS lock. Finally, if you have no route created and no GPS lock but want to find a POI somewhere other than using the center of the screen as the point of reference, you have to get out of the POI interface, move the map so that the city or area in question is at the map's center and then go back into the POI interface to search. By contrast, TTN6 has selectable options for POI near you, POI in city, POI near home, POI along route and POI near destination. That's much simpler and more direct, and doesn't require that you remember sets of conditions that allow certain types of searches, as with Ostia.