Windows Phone Thoughts: Lost In Space (or the UK)? Get the Navman GPS 4400!

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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 final method that the software offers is points of interest. In order to be able make it as easy as possible for you to find the point of interest you are after, the software takes you through several filtering steps. The first, shown in Figure 21, allows you to pick a category. Now, the difficult thing about this is trying to identify which category is the right category, but no system is going to be perfect, so this is as good as any.


Figure 21: Picking a category for the Point of Interest

Once you've picked the category, you can pick the type of Point of Interest, as shown in Figure 22. This drop-down list is restricted to those types that are valid for the category that you picked earlier.


Figure 22: Picking a type for the Point of Interest

So, you've picked the category, you've picked the type. If you want to, you can further limit the number of results you get back by entering an area - this can be a town name, county or something similar. As an example, I entered London and clicked on the Next arrow. Figure 23 shows the first few results of cinemas in London.


Figure 23: Cinemas in London

Once you've found a point of interest that meets your needs or criteria, you can click on Show to just see the map with the point highlighted, or you can click on Go to get the system to calculate the route from where you are to the specified point.

This feature works well in principle - so long as you know the name of the point of interest. There are some scenarios, however, where you might not know the name - you just know the type of "thing" that you are looking for. A good example is fuel for your car. You don't necessarily care what the name of the garage is - you just want one that is near you. Now, you can ask the software to give you all of the garages in a given area but what it doesn't do is show how far they are from where you are.

It is possible to get the software to display POI icons on the map as you are navigating (as shown in Figure 24 below), so it might be possible to find points of interest as you go along your route … but that is only going to work if the locations are close enough to your route to be visible on the map.

Once you've set your destination, the software goes off and calculates a route from your current location. It is also possible to use the software without GPS and specify a start point and an end point and get it to calculate the route.

The software can display instructions for the route in one of three ways, as shown in the next three screenshots.


Figure 24: Turn by turn instructions with the map


Figure 25: Instructions without the map


Figure 26: Complete list of instructions

In the mode shown in Figure 24, where it says "ETA", you can click to get other information displayed, including distance to go, time to go to destination, the current time and the current speed. You can zoom in and out by pressing up and down on the D-pad. However, the software does automatically change the zoom factor as you get closer to a turn so, unless you are stationary or in map mode (see below) the scale you select might not last long.

Changing between the modes is done by pressing RIGHT on the D-pad. If you put the system into the mode shown in Figure 25, you can change the "ETA" area and the time area to show any of the display options listed above.

The final display mode that the system offers is "map mode", as shown in Figure 27. In this mode, your current location is shown without any route instructions or other information. The other interesting difference between this mode and "turn-by-turn" mode is that in "turn-by-turn" mode, the orientation of the map is set to follow the direction you are driving in, whereas in map mode, the orientation of the map is always North.


Figure 27: Map mode

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