GPS Devices Life

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I have been in the market for a GPS for some time now. We have been hearing all this talk about “convergence” for years now and I thought it was time to check out what the market had to offer.

GPS comes in many shapes, sizes, and devices. There are dedicated GPS devices as well as other devices that have had GPS features added to it, like cell phones and PDAs.

I knew I definitely wanted a GPS, but I wanted to get a PDA, too. After doing some research, the HP iPAQ rx5910 looked like a pretty good offering.

PDA features

As a PDA, this device runs on the Microsoft Windows Mobile Platform. The PDA comes standard with a mobile version of Word so you can open Word documents. Microsoft Exchange integration is also done seamlessly. My Outlook inbox on the mobile device syncs up with my desktop version. My appointments, calendars, notes are all present. As far as PDA features go, this device does well integrating with a Windows Server environment.

Because the device runs on the Windows Mobile Platform, any other third party Windows Mobile apps will work just fine on this device. Installation of third party apps is relatively straightforward and easy.

The PDA has connectivity to wifi hot spots and I have had no problems connecting to a hotspot. The browser included with the PDA works well and renders the web pages as expected. Though I’ve read many complaints about the browser from other people, I have been quite satisfied with its abilities.

The device also supports Bluetooth, however, I’ve not had an opportunity to try it out yet.

Overall, I would say that I was quite satisfied with the PDA functionality of the device. The handwriting recognition software worked well, though I should note that I used to be a heavy user of a Palm Pilot, so there was no learning curve switching over to this device.

GPS features

What made this iPAQ particularly attractive to me was the Tom Tom software that came pre-installed with North America maps. I have used the Tom Tom Navigator software on a dedicated Tom Tom device and really liked the software. I thought it was easy and intuitive to use. Tom Tom Navigator employs the use of Icons to navigate through its menu system.

There are a few things to note about this version of Tom Tom software, however. There are no Text-To-Speech abilities in this GPS unit. This means that the GPS does not say street names in its turn by turn directions. The unit will say “Turn right” instead of “Turn right on Palm Avenue.” This is a sorely missed feature.

The form factor of this device makes for using the touch screen a little more difficult that dedicated devices. The actual touch screen area is smaller than comparable GPS units and the QWERTY keyboard keys are a little smaller than is practical to use for me. I end up making a lot of typos and find it hard to enter in addresses while driving. Some may argue that I shouldn’t be trying to enter addresses while driving, but that is a discussion for another epinion.

There is an eight direction keypad on the front of the unit which is supposed to help in the scrolling and selection of fields. It takes a little getting used to, but works well. I would rather forgo the keypad and buttons for a larger screen, though.

Syncing up to find a GPS signal is a little on the slow side compared to other GPS units. In the past year this sync up time has grown from 30-60 seconds to more than 10 minutes now! This has been my biggest complaint with the unit, though it has been acting up like this only recently. It has become bad enough that I am now looking for another GPS unit. As such, I cannot recommend this unit to anyone.

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Tags: car gps, gps device, gps unit, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Navigator, Palm