Monday, November 17, 2003
Lost In Space (or the UK)? Get the Navman GPS 4400!
Posted by Philip Colmer in "HARDWARE" @ 10:00 AM
The main menu is reached by pressing LEFT on the D-pad at any time. It is from here that you perform the initial GPS setup, adjust the volume and make any other setup adjustments (more on these later).
The first two icons, though, are the key to setting up a route for the system to follow. There are several ways of specifying where you want to go:
- Picking a pre-defined "Quick Nav" entry;
- Picking a pre-defined "Favourite" entry;
- Entering an address;
- Specifying the intersection of two roads;
- Selecting a Point of Interest;
- Picking a recent trip;
- Tap-and-holding on a location on the map and choosing "Navigate to";
- Doing the return journey.
Figure 15: Quick Nav selection screen
Figure 16: Favourite List selection screen
The difference between Quick Nav and Favourites is principally one of numbers - you can only store three "Quick Navs", so these would be your most-used destinations. As you can see from the screenshot, Quick Nav also gives you easy access to picking the return trip or a recent destination as well. Specifying a favourite is easy - just find the location on the map, tap and hold, and choose Add to favourites, as shown in Figure 17.
Figure 17: Adding a new favourite
Once you've specified your favourite destinations, it's another easy process to specify your three Quick Navs - just go into the Favourites selection screen and edit the three favourites in turn to specify which Quick Nav slot they are going to occupy.
Figure 18: Different ways of specifying the destination
The remaining methods of specifying the destination are all grouped into a single screen, as shown in Figure 18. The easiest, entering the address, is shown in Figure 19. It is the easiest, but still not that easy to use. The idea is that you enter the road name and then the number. The problem is that the software is a bit quirky about the road name. For example, if you enter "trinity close", it doesn't match against anything. Instead, you have to enter "trinity", click on the drop-down list and then carry on typing in more letters. You can't always scroll down straight away because the software limits the number of results in order to economise on memory usage.
Figure 19: Specifying the address
I wasn't that happy with the fact that you could only specify the address and house number. In the UK, it is more common to accurately specify an address through the combination of a post code and a house number. Apart from accuracy, this is a lot easier to enter than a road name. I also have my doubts as to whether or not the software even uses the house number. It always failed to find the correct location of my home in the specified road.
The next method of specifying the destination - Intersection - is even worse. In theory, it should work really well. As Figure 20 shows, you specify the two roads that intersect. The software, not unreasonably, is clever and once you've specified the first road, it limits the second list to be the list of roads that intersect with the first road. That way, it isn't possible to specify invalid combinations.
Figure 20: Specifying a destination through intersection
The problem is that I couldn't find any combination of roads that worked. In London, for example, Regent Street intersects with Oxford Street. The first problem is that the software lists NINE occurrences of Regent Street - two of which are in Soho and four in Mayfair. Similarly, Oxford Street is listed nine times, so it makes it pretty darn hard to find the right combination of Oxford Street and Regent Street.
