Prim tones keep drivers on track

By RICHARD WOOD

If I earned a living selling printed street maps, I would be worried. With a Navman iCN 630 in-car navigation system who needs them?

Motorists in Japan, Europe and the United States have for years been able to cruise the highways, bypasses and backroads of their countries with an electronic navigator perched on the dashboard.

Finally, the digital maps have been made available to allow us the same luxury - and the first portable in-car navigation system to hit the market here has been put together by local companies.

You don't have to be a computer programmer to use it. Installation is as simple as plugging a jack into your car cigarette lighter and attaching a suction cup to your windscreen.

Just type in the street address of your destination and the device does the rest - talking to a network of global positioning satellites that calculate and show your position.

A prim, female voice will keep you on the right track, removing in some cases the need to look at the navigation screen at all.

"Travel 250m, then turn left," she will command. Or "Entering motorway, veer right".

If you miss an important turn: "Perform a legal u-turn." You won't catch a note of disdain in this girl's tone. If you don't like her there are three other voices to choose from.

The locally manufactured Navman iCN 630, launched in Europe and the US this year, will be available in New Zealand after it is launched in Australia next month.

The local price has not yet been set, but it sells for £999 ($2846) in Britain and around US$1000 (1778) in the US. A cheaper pocket PC-based version with a GPS sleeve will also be available.

For business use, price should not be an obstacle. It looks a winner for sales reps, travelling executives, rental car firms, and those famously under-informed Auckland taxi drivers.

It's also going to make driving overseas much less daunting. Unlike pre-installed car systems, the iCN 630 can be moved from car to car and country to country.

New maps and updates on CD are loaded from a PC through a USB cable, but in future they may be available on SD card or as internet downloads.

When using the system the first step is to establish a GPS fix.

In most cases this is easy because there are plenty of satellites that the device taps into, but if you start driving from an "urban canyon" like Queen St, you can strike problems because of tall buildings. Setting your destination is a bit fiddly because you select a street using a thumb key to navigate an on-screen Qwerty keyboard.

Alternatively, you can pinpoint the position on the map.

I was impressed by the unit's speed in recalculating routes on the fly. If you decide to turn off the prescribed course it barely skips a beat before giving you a new course - great for wrong turns, and also when you want to vary the route for your own reasons.

The LCD display is very clear even in bright sunlight. You can zoom in and zoom out and it also does this automatically according to how fast you are travelling.

One lesson to learn early is that it is issuing navigation advice, not commands. So when it says "turn left", don't ignore that red light.

A fun feature is the simulation mode. You set a destination and it travels along the map, and you can see which roads it has chosen.

A trick to note is that you can set it to do the "shortest" or "quickest" route. If you choose shortest you may get some surprises.

It should be noted that Connect tested the iCN 630 with a pre-release copy of the map data, which comes from Auckland firm Air Logistics.

However, the map data is expected to include markers for points of interest such as ATM machines, airports and toilets.

As an example of limitations at this early stage, we couldn't find streets in the township of Ormond, and when travelling to Gisborne it went down State Highway 2 instead of the State Highway 27 route that canny locals would use.

For safety reasons the device tries to stop the driver from pressing its buttons while driving - although some bad drivers will likely defeat this by answering "yes" when asked whether they are the passenger in the vehicle.

A minor annoyance was that when I turned on the car ignition the iCN 630 lost power and switched off every time. This will vary from car to car, depending on how your cigarette lighter's power supply works.

The iCN 630 gets quite warm in use and cannot be left in strong sunlight, but you may not want to leave such an easily "liftable" device in full view in the car anyway.

Inside the device uses the Intel PXA250 Xscale processor with 64MB of map storage memory, 64MM for system operation, an SD/MMC memory card expansion slot, a USB port to connect to a PC, and a magnesium alloy case.

Overall the Navman iCN 630 is a remarkably functional device and a must-have for anyone planning a driving holiday at home or abroad.

Navman iCN 630

* Price: to be advised (£999 in Europe, approx US$1000 in North America).

* Pros: portable, high-quality screen, voice directions, automatic route recalculation.

* Cons: price, no built-in battery.

* Rating: 9/10