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(More customer reviews)After seeing the terrible review at InfoSyncWorld, I became very worried that I was going to regret having just purchased the Navman PiN 100. There is very little in the way of reviews for this product so I will try to be as thorough as I can.
As a Pocket PC, I am completely satisfied with the Navman PiN 100. It is actually just a Mio DigiWalker (it even has the Mio DigiWalker logo on the back of it) so if you have seen reviews for that, then this is the same thing. It runs Windos Mobile 2003, has one expansion slot (an SDIO slot), and a suitably fast CPU and on-device storage & memory. I have used it as a Pocket PC for many things now and have not once felt the hardware specs to be lacking. Handwriting recognition is still awful but that is something to mention in a review of Windows Mobile 2003 operating system itself, not the Navman.
You WILL need a 256 or 512MB SD card to hold maps. The included 32MB card is basically worthless, I left it in the box and never used it. Many if not most states are over 30MB and that means you would not even be able to load them onto the card. I suggest getting one of those 256MB cards with wifi ability built-in, then you can kill two birds with one stone. Wifi is a neat thing to have.
As an in-car GPS solution, the Navman is hands-down absolutely the best value on the market. For under $500 (which is including the absolutely necessary additional purchase of a memory card) you get a Pocket PC, all necessary cables, an unobtrusive GPS receiver, a windshield mount, a car charger/adapter, and of course the Smart ST v2 GPS software. The Garmin iQue 3600 is its closest competitor -- I tried it too and decided the Navman PiN was both the better value and the superior product (bigger, brighter screen among many other things). Unfortunately the Navman PiN package feels exactly like what it is -- not one well-integrated product but a box of products sold as a bundle. When you open the box you are confronted with several envelopes, nearly a half dozen CD-ROMs, three different user manuals, and a confusing pile of cords and accessories. They burden you with actually loading the Smart ST v2 software on the Pocket PC, before you load it on your PC, register it and activate it, then install ActiveSync from another CD, and a bunch of other hassles like configuring the GPS COM port and baud rate -- TOO many hassles -- before you are finally ready to use the product. There was so much paperwork in the box that I spent several confused minutes wondering where the serial number was that the software wanted in order to install it. I would like to see the software pre-loaded on the handheld and all of the necessary stuff for your PC come on one single DVD ROM. I just plunked down 5 benjamins for a GPS toy, do you think I have not found myself a DVD drive for my computer yet? Get with the 21st century people.
Battery life is certainly better than the iQue 3600. It is at least 3 or 4 hours but I haven't done any real tests so I don't have an actual figure to give.
The GPS receiver takes some time to pick up satellites. Anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes on your first use, and 2 to 5 minutes from a cold start after that. It seems like definitely longer if you are moving. This is too long in my opinion, I don't know if other receivers are better, or not. As an in-car device I generally want to take it out of my pocket, put it on the dash, and have it ready to go. Instead I have to sort of sit there in the car for a few minutes or just wait until the first stoplight to check on where I am or where I am going.
The car charger is just that -- nothing to say about it. It gets the job done and is nice to have. The windshield mount is a suction cup mount and secures excellently to the windshield. I wish I could say the same for how well it secures the handheld. It barely does at all. It sort of just cradles it lightly. If you put your Navman in it without the utmost care, it is liable to fall right out. That is NOT good. I recommend angling it back some so that gravity holds it in a little. This seems to work for me. I would have rather it clipped in or snapped in, but no.
The rest of this review is going to sound pretty harsh because I don't really like the GPS software that the Navman PiN comes with (Smart ST v2 2.00.0036 SP2). It is promising, but fatally flawed. I want to say up front though, that I would not give up using this device just because I think the software sucks. I just deal with the frustrations and hope there will be an update to iron them out later.
First off, the map view. The map view is gorgeous, in full 16-bit color, with color coded roads to show your route, the current road you're on, roads that pass under/over your road, and little arrows indicating direction of traffic. Major and minor roads are different colors, and the roadnames are displayed very clearly and legibly. Geography like lakes and forest is marked with blue and green. The view switches to a 3D angled view whenever you are on a route to a destination, and rotates so that up is always your heading and you can see more in front of you than behind. The graphics are state-of-the-art for this market and nothing in its price range with the exception of TomTom Navigator can touch it. Your friends will be impressed.
The voice navigation is well-timed and intelligible, with the exception of "make a legal u-turn" which to most people sounds like "make illegal u-turn" (worth a few laughs). Voice only says when to turn and which direction, it doesn't say the street name or even highway number, which is too bad but that's typical for a PocketPC program.
The two big disasters of this software are its address input for destinations and routing, and the routing algorithm itself. These are the fatally flawed features which keep me from recommending this device to anyone who would get frustrated easily.
When inputting an address, you are allowed to select from your contacts (a Windows Mobile 2003 feature), however if you do this, you will 100% of the time be told that you have selected an invalid address. Sometimes this is because the map data is 18 months old and doesn't know this address exists, but most of the time it will accept the address if you re-enter it by hand. This is unacceptable. Also, when you start entering it by hand, it will suggest a drop down list of possible locations, and they will all seem pretty much like the same place. There is no way to tell if the address you are entering should be in Richmond VA, Richmond MCD VA, or one of several other entries for what is obviously the same place. Then you will enter a street, for instance Lotus Lane, but it will not be found because you didn't type Lotus La. This is asinine. Entering the address for a destination takes 5 mintues because of this nonsense, when it should take 5 seconds. And you will have to do this every time you enter the address, unless you pick destinations off of your "Recent" list. Once, I loaded a destination off of my contact list and ignored the "invalid address" warning and Smart ST2 routed me to some completely non-related location of the same town. From now on I make sure I do the address input in the way it wants it.
As for routing, it has a lot of quirks. I will describe some of the ones I have experienced. To put it blunty, it can recommend some DUMB routes -- I mean really out of your way sometimes. I use "quickest" navigation and "shortest distance" is even worse. Once it took me to what appeared to be a complete dead end, and the map said I could keep going -- not without a machete I couldn't. I drew an "avoid area" and the route put me back on the course I should have stayed on in the first place. Other times, it takes you pretty close to where you have to go and says you have reached your destination, but you could be anywhere from one to eight blocks away from where you need to be. This can be frustrating if you fight hard for a parking spot in the city and get out and realize you still have to walk 8 blocks. It might have to do with the way the software estimates street addresses. It uses ranges of addresses and estimation to guess where a particular street address is. Sometimes this works reasonably well and other times (when ranges are large) it doesn't work at all. You might be better off never giving it a street address. Instead only give it street intersections and take yourself from there. Autorouting works fairly well, but Smart ST2 is slow to route anything, and so it will display a question mark for a minute or two until it suggests a new route. Sometimes when you know better and have a better route in mind, it will stubbornly insist you make a u-turn at every cross street until finally re-routing and "seeing the light" of what route you had in mind. I have seen other PocketPC software be smarter and faster at re-routing.
So in conclusion, I highly recommend this product to geeks willing to deal with some quirks (and hope for fixes), but not to the general public who would probably be hopelessly frustrated by the routing and input problems, despite the pretty interface and good value.
P.S. my review of the software is of the version after you apply the currently available patch on Navman's site. Before I did this, all of the routing problems I mentioned above were like twice as bad, and I would have given two stars instead of three. When reading any poor reviews of the Navman PiN, try to check if they are using the software before or after the patch.
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Navman PIN 100 PORTABLE GPS POCKET PC NAVIGATION SYSTEM
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