Thursday, January 12, 2006
Road Trip Revolutions: The MyGuide 500 Navigation System Reviewed
Posted by Doug Raeburn in "HARDWARE" @ 09:00 AM
Entering an Address
Figure 8: OCN 5 has street smarts.
This screen is used to enter an address for a destination. You work from top down and left to right, and your previous choices provide a filter to limit your subsequent choices to valid ones. For example, once you’re selected Madison as the city, only streets that are in Madison will be available to choose. And once you’ve chosen a street, only valid numbers on that street are available.
If you don’t know the exact address number, you can select a cross street in the Intersection box to get close to your final destination.
Points of Interest
Figure 9: Yeah, I’ll actually be staying at the Motel 6 a few blocks away…
As stated before, POIs can be located in a browsed city, as in Figure 9. As with address entry, previous choices filter subsequent choices. So you specify a City or ZIP and the categories available there are displayed. Select a category and the POIs in that category are listed.
Figure 10: At least I don’t have to drive far to max out my credit card…
Another option is a POI near the current GPS location. Here you start out with the radius for which you wish to look for a POI. Then the categories and POIs that match are displayed.
Route Planning
Figure 11: Maybe I should have worn my dressy flannel shirt…
Combined with its seamless maps, OCN’s route planning feature brings it into the big leagues as a navigation tool. You can plan an entire cross country route with intermediate stops for hotels, tourist attractions, etc. Working from the route planning screen, you select waypoints in the same manner as you would select a single destination and add them to your route. You can calculate the route at any time and the distance and approximate time from the previous waypoint is displayed.
