Digital Trends

Delphi NAV300 December 27th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We used the Nav300 over the course of about six weeks, and though it was always able to point us to our destination, we ultimately came away frustrated. Let’s start at the beginning.

We plugged the Nav300 into our car’s cigarette lighter and turned it on. The bootup process for the device is agonizingly slow, taking up to one minute before you can actually do anything. And even then, you have to press OK on a disclaimer screen every time you turn it on that says using a GPS while driving is dangerous (anyone else see the irony here?).

Once we had learned the dangers of GPSing, we came to the main menu, which has eight buttons including Navigation, Music, Movies, etc. We chose Navigation, and were presented with four options: New destination, My destinations, Take me home, and Voice command.

The main navigation screen is sparse but useful.

We chose New destination, but when we went to type in an address the Nav300 thought we were in Oregon even though we were in Texas. We aren’t really sure why a GPS unit wouldn’t know what state it was in, but regardless we had to change the state to TX. The only possible reason we can think of is DT is based in Oregon, and it was configured in Oregon first, then mailed to Texas and maybe for some reason the Nav300 never recovered. Throughout testing we had to always tell the GPS what state we were in before looking up an address, which is silly. One might say it was set up to default to Oregon, which is what we thought too, but we could not locate this setting anywhere, even after reading the manual. We also set our Texas-based address to “home” on the unit, but it still defaulted to Oregon.

For some reason, the Nav300 always thought we resided in Oregon, even though we’re in Texas.

Once we were able to actually input our address, we ran into another small problem. The buttons are a bit too small to punch with your fingers, but Delphi provides a stylus which is almost required, in our opinion. The only problem is there’s nowhere to stash the stylus when you are not using it. One would think there’d be a hole in the side of the device, similar to a Palm Pilot that you can slide the stylus into, but that is not the case. We ended up keeping the stylus in a cup holder in our car, which is not ideal.

Once we had typed in an address, the Nav300 locked on to it just fine, but once it has the address you still have to press “Start Navigation,” and that process, whereby the Nav300 calculates and propagates the map is ponderous, and takes about 30 seconds or so.

So after about five minutes of plucking the keyboard, we were finally ready to have the Nav300 navigate for us, and it does a superb job once it’s up and running. It dishes out voice commands exactly as you would expect, such as “turn right in .1 miles onto such and such road,” and works very well. It also shows you landmarks on your route, such as restaurants and businesses. We also liked the fact that you can change the view from 2D to 3D, and even switch into night mode with increased contrast for nighttime viewing.

Several times we ignored the Nav300 and chose our own route, and it was able to adapt just fine and re-calculate the route perfectly - which is great.

Once we got past all the hurdles of punching in our state, then our location, it was a very competent device for basic navigation. We also liked the POI mode (points of interest) as it directed us to our nearest bank when we needed to find an ATM machine. Unfortunately, one time we tried to find a Quiznos, and looked up “sandwiches,” but it was only able to find Subway.

We did like the ability to assign our home address to a voice command, and just yell “home” and have it automatically begin navigating. This is a nice feature indeed.