Leibson's Law

Dec 17 2007 3:44PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (6) |
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Last Friday, I bought a V7 NAV730 GPS unit. Fry’s put it on sale for $129.99 and my price resistance crumbled. I used it over the weekend and already have some surprising (to me, anyway) observations. First, it’s a low-end GPS unit so my expectations were low. I was pleasantly surprised. For a low-end unit, the NAV730 does a lot of things. Its text-to-speech feature announces the street names so well that I’ve found I don’t actually need to see the unit’s screen to navigate. The screen map is nice (I’d thought I’d need a bigger screen, but I don’t for viewing) and it’s fun watching my position update in real time, but I don’t need the screen to follow the well-enunciated directions.

That doesn’t mean that the spoken directions are flawless. For one thing, some of the pronunciations are amusingly off. For example, De La Cruz Blvd near San Jose Mineta International Airport is pronounced “De Lane Cruz” because the unit mistakenly thinks the “La” is an abbreviation for “lane.” Guadalupe Parkway is pronounced “guadaloop,” which is actually correct in Phoenix for some reason, but not in San Jose. In addition, the spoken street reference is sometimes not correct. This morning, I was driving to work on Lafayette, which the NAV730 had correctly detected, and the voice prompt advised me to take the next left onto Lafayette, which would actually be Central Expressway. At the stop light, the unit corrected itself.

There are issues with some addresses. For example, Tensilica (where I work) is located at the intersection of Octavius and Augustine but the street address is on Scott Blvd. because the building is in an office park and all of the buildings in the park have a Scott Blvd. address. The NAV730 can’t figure out this conundrum and I suspect most GPS units have the same problem.

My second surprise was the NAV730’s responsiveness. It’s surprisingly good considering that the underlying operating system is Windows CE (my expectations were low). The NAV730’s 400-MHz processor helps in this regard and it helps make the unit into a dandy hand warmer as well.

The embedded navigation software is based on Nav N Go’s iGo software, which is also available for PDAs. The iGo software uses maps from Tele Atlas. I’m mildly interested in having a map of Canada co-reside on the SD memory card that holds the NAV730 maps, but I can’t buy one yet (or any other add-ons for that matter) from V7, which doesn’t seem to realize what a winner it has in this GPS unit and its family brethren.

The NAV730 is also a personal digital media player. It can play MP3 and WMA audio files and a surprisingly wide variety of video files. Plug the GPS unit into a PC’s USB port and it appears as a disk drive in Windows Explorer making file transfer easy. I’d love to have the chance to use this slim unit as a PDA, which should be a snap considering that it’s running Windows CE but I don’t see a way to make that happen, yet.

According to Dean Takahashi’s column in today’s San Jose Mercury News, GPS units are this year’s hot gift because prices have dropped low enough to transform the product offerings into impulse buys. Perhaps Dean was watching me buy my NAV730 at Fry’s last Friday. In all, I’d have to say that the NAV730 is a pretty impressive device and certainly points the way towards the future of such CE devices. (By the way, EDN’s John Gallant covered GPS way back in 1993, which is just a bit too far back for EDN’s online archives.)