Navman ICN 530

Author's product rating:   

Reliability	Excellent
Ease of Use	Simple
Look & Feel	Good
Battery life	Good
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Start up speed, signal strength, cost, onboard memory, USB charging
Disadvantages:	Fiddly windscreen clamp

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The Navman 530 is the successor to the ICN 520 Sat Nav that I own. Buying this was a present for my parents that I landed up keeping myself and buying another for them. Originally I was looking for a simple yet quality packed Sat Nav. As per its predecessor, the 530 is a simple Sat Nav to use and not one of the many PDA's with a Sat Nav function. Navman have been making Marine navigation for a long time and have used the advances they made for sea navigation to make this a great in car solution. Mapping is provided by Tele Atlas and are regularly kept up to date with a website where an anomaly can be report by users and corrected for future releases.
The satellite pick up is very fast, from a cold start where the device is switched on in a different location to where it was switched off taking under 1 min compared to up to 5 mins on the older 520 ICN. Signal strength has also been greatly increased with the 530 now benefiting from an internal aerial. Other advances are onboard memory that can take the whole of the UK (for the rest, memory cards can be used), longer battery life, much faster processing and a louder clearer voice. With the package I bought, the 530 came with a case, European maps, a remote control, charging cables, connection cables and the usual manuals. The latter are of little use, the software is very easy to use and menus are well laid out with no array of menus within menus. I used the device to get me from Wimbledon (UK) to Venice (Italy) and let the device do everything for me on the planning side of things even avoiding tool roads!. It has the ferry routes included with the software and with the Petrol Station and Parking buttons there were no "blind" searches for fuel in the middle of the night. I thought the remote control would be pointless until I was driving in town and wanted to visit a friend, the passenger used the remote to make the necessary changes without having to lean across me to get to the Sat Nav. As per the previous versions, you can add points of interest and with the software, airports, restaurants, banks, post boxes and many other amenities are already loaded.
The Touch screen seems to also have been improved, the new windscreen clamp is very easy to attach to the inside of the windscreen but I find it very fiddly to "slot" in the device compared to the clamp for the 530 but with practice it gets easier.
Another change to the old 520 is that the 530 can be charged via a USB cable that makes life much easier when travelling not having to carry around a charger and then worrying about adapters etc. There is also the addition of a traffic module that can be attached to the 530 providing up-to-date information on the roads.
On the whole the 530 is a massive improvement on the Sat Nav's from a year or two ago. Considering the cost and its performance I cannot fault it. There are newer machines out there with onboard camera's, larger memory, and bigger screens but they are about twice the price, and as always you get what you pay for but this item in my opinion gives the best value for money. I paid £238 back in November but I am sure that with a search on the net you can find it better priced!

For further information on the traffic modules etc visit Navman's website at www.navman.com.