Windows Phone Thoughts: Pharos Traveler 525 GPS Part 2 - Ostia 7.5 Navigation Software

Setting up a Route
Ostia provides a number of ways to identify and store your destinations. If you are looking at a map on the screen and you can see your destination, simply double tap on that point. Navigation around the map is accomplished either by using the five-way joystick on the unit, or by dragging a crosshair which shows up when you tap the screen.


Figure 7: Ostia’s 2D view with the crosshair which can be dragged to set a destination. Zooming is accomplished by dragging diagonally left to right (zoom in) or right to left (zoom out)

You can then specify this as a one-time use Destination, or you can save it in your personal list of favorites.


Figure 8: Saving a destination.

You can also specify the destination by providing the street address, accessible from the Go button in the bottom left of the screen. The Ostia software does this by first asking for the street number, then the name of the street. Using some predictive logic on the currently loaded map(s), once you provide the first few letters of the street name, Ostia will then present a list of possible options, from which you select the most appropriate ones. With the Canadian maps provided, longer streets were broken down into the postal code areas they served, so it’s helpful to know the postal code as well. By the way, Ostia also lets you define a destination by its postal code directly or an intersection.

You can also select destinations from a list of recently visited points, from your Favorites list or, from the Contacts defined within Pocket Outlook.


Figure 9: Options available for defining a destination.

Along with the map, Pharos provides pre-defined references for various Points of Interest. These are categorized by areas useful to the traveler.


Figure 10: Points of Interest. Note that Ostia can be configured to limit the area to be included in finding POIs and the total number displayed.

It’s also easy to determine a route with various stops on a multi-point trip. When each point is defined, Ostia asks if this is a multi-stop or a destination.


Figure 11: Telling Ostia what type of stop this is.

Multi-stops must be defined before you select your final destination, and you should select each of the multi-stops in the order in which you wish to visit them.


Figure 12: Example of a multi-point trip.

After a multi-stop trip has been defined you can review the stops, but the only way to reorder the stops is to delete and re-enter them. However, you can tell Ostia to optimize the trip, so it will find the best route through the multi-stops, given your current location.