Windows Phone Thoughts: Road Trip Reloaded: OCN All in One GPS Reviewed

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Friday, February 4, 2005

Road Trip Reloaded: OCN All in One GPS Reviewed

Posted by Doug Raeburn in "HARDWARE" @ 10:00 AM


The Hardware Aspect
The Mitac hardware makes for a very capable navigation unit. The bright screen is very easy to read and it doesn't wash out to a great degree in direct sunlight. It also has a wide viewing angle, an important characteristic for a unit that's mounted on your windshield… you don't have to be looking at it straight on to be able to see the screen.

I found the GPS hardware to be quite satisfactory. After the initial hard reset, it took about 4 minutes to lock on to any satellites, so I assume that it was doing a "search the sky" routine. Afterwards, though, it would pick up 3 or more satellites in 15 seconds or less. It was also quite sensitive... while testing, I'd often just jump into the car with the Mitac and the car charger, leaving the unit on my passenger seat. Once it locked on to enough satellites, it never had any connection problems.

Finally, the speed of the navigation software was just fine, even though the processor is no speed demon. Initial route creation was fine, maps displayed quickly, and route recalculation was nearly instantaneous. I would have liked to compare it speed-wise to my 520 MHz Loox 720, but the software can be activated on one unit only, so that test wasn't possible.

Conclusions
While the OCN All-In-One GPS is only adequate as a general purpose Pocket PC, it's a dynamite navigation package. It excels in the important areas of Pocket PC basics that are important to a navigation unit… the bright screen and the impressive sound volume. And the OnCourse Navigator software has jumped to the top of my list, for its strong overall performance, quality routing, superior itinerary functionality and the corridor maps. It's not the cheapest Pocket PC and it's not wireless-enabled, but compared to dedicated automotive navigation units from Garmin and Magellan, it's still quite a value.

And given that I'm familiar with the navigation software bundled with the Digiwalker and the Navman PiN, I can say that in my opinion, the OnCourse Navigator software makes this version of this ubiquitous Pocket PC the best of the three.

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