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HP iPAQ 310 Travel Companion January 27th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We pulled the 310 out of the box and examined the contents. It includes a large plastic arm that mounts to the windshield of the car via a suction cup. We attached it to our windshield and it locked on very tight. There’s also the option to mount it on the dash, but after playing with the adhesive base we couldn’t figure out how to attach it to the mounting device. We looked at the manual and it only had directions for mounting it to the windshield, and was thus not helpful.

We mounted it to the windshield and turned it on, and were immediately impressed with the display. This is the brightest, sharpest display we’ve ever seen on a GPS and it looks gorgeous.

We turned it on and selected “navigation” and then clicked “map,” and after a few seconds it showed us our current location as we were driving down the street, which was great. 

Navigation issues

We then went to navigate to a destination, and ran into some issues with the 310’s design. To be blunt, the navigation click-throughs are fairly easy to use but HP has put in plenty of useless screens that need to be clicked on. For example, we told the device we were in Texas, so when we click “Go to” it gives us the option of TX, United States.

We wanted to navigate, so first we clicked TX, United States.

It then asked us if we were in USA or Canada, and if we select USA it then asks us what state we are in.

After clicking TX, United States it asks us if we are in Canada or the USA. It then asked us what state we were in. What??

Since that route wasn’t working, pun intended, we decided to just enter our zip code. Once we did that, it asked us for “name/zip code.” What is this supposed to mean? We tried typing in “Starbucks” but it wouldn’t let us complete the word. We were befuddled, but this is pretty much par for the course on this device. The interface is utterly baffling.

The Terminator

We also had an issue with not being able to cancel navigation. Typically when you are navigating to a destination, and you navigate away from the screen giving you directions it’ll ask you if you want to cancel the route planning, but that is not the case with the 310; it keeps navigating, no matter what. In fact, if you choose a route and then decided to just cancel, it won’t, even if you go back to the home page. From there, pressing the “map” button takes you back to the route you were previously navigating. One time we even turned it off because we were tired of hearing it tell us to turn here and go there, and it magically turned itself back on a few minutes later to tell us to make a turn. It’s literally like the Terminator as far as navigation goes. 

Contacts

One of the features that make this a “travel companion” is the ability to enter your Outlook contacts into the device, and then call them (if you have a Bluetooth phone) or navigate to their house using the 310. We do not use Outlook nor do we have a Bluetooth phone, so we couldn’t fully test these features. However, we played around with it and have a few complaints. The long story short is that we were never able to fully enter all the information we needed to navigate to our contact because the software only let us put in a street, city and zip code, but no actual address. Even worse, when we went to navigate to the contact we set up it was not listed for some reason. We tried to navigate to our contact’s address manually and it told us the address is not valid. Every GPS we’ve tested won’t even allow “invalid” addresses to be entered, but suffice to say the contacts functionality of the 310 has problems.