If your sense of direction is as bad as mine, then you will find GPS a godsend! This is my second GPS unit (it suffered the same fate as many of my phones, i accidentally sat on it!). I brought the ICN 510 for around £360 from ebuyer.com
General use: ------------------ The screen is a fair size, and is nice and bright. The screen is touchscreen, making it very easy to use, the stylus is neatly stored in the righthand side of the unit, just like a PDA. Unfortunatly to use GPS, you must lift up the antenna, this is quite a large antenna, it will not fit into my shirt pocket unless i first shut up the antenna. The GPS will give you directions as you move about, you can press the page button to get a detailed view of the next turn this is very useful to correctly identify which exit to take from complicated roundabouts.
The GPS has trip planning function, which means you can add upto 14 destinations to visit one after the other, so for example i can go from A to D via B. This is very useful under some circumstances, however it does not automatically decide in which order the destinations should be visited, it will direct you to them in the order you entered them so if you do not change it yourself you could find yourself doing a lot more miles!
I find the Nearest POI (point of interest) very very useful! It lets you find say the nearest garage to your current location. There are many different POIs that navman supports, for example Buildings and Monuments, Food and Drink, and Tourist Attractions. It also allows you to import custom POI known as active POI. There is an active POI available that shows you where speed cameras are, which is very useful.
Occasionally the GPS system is not accurate, it sometimes wrongly locates your position, it is normally fairly close to where you really are however it can make a lot of difference which exit to take. Eventually the ICN510 discovers it has made a mistake and corrects itself, although some acknowledgement of its mistake would be nice!
Connecting to PC: ----------------------- The GPS has a mini USB connector on the bottom, which i think is brilliant! Now most USB devices use this sort of connector, so i only need one cable plugged into my computer!
In car use: ------------- My ICN 510 came with a holder which sticks to the windscreen with a suction cup for incar use. It is easy to fit and remove the GPS from the holder. The car holder sticks onto the windscreen, and has a ball joint which makes positioning it very easy.
Use on foot: ---------------- The navman has an internal rechargable battery, it can be charged either with a mains adaptor or the car adaptor. This means that it is easy to take it out and about. The battery should last for around 4 hours when fully charged, however my gps did not have a battery meter, so i was unable to know this
Verdict: ---------- This is a reasonable GPS unit, however because it takes a long time to pinpoint your exact position and is not always accurate i believe you could get better value for your money with some other models. I am not sure if you can upgrade the software on these, perhaps mine just has old software, i will look into this and update my review accordingly.
The only reason i am not recommending it to buyers is because i believe you could get better value for money with some of the other models available.
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