Digital Trends

Nextar I4-BC October 13th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Backup Camera

The concept of a backup camera sounds like a no-brainer when you’re squeezing in and out of tight spots all day in an urban environment, but unfortunately, we didn’t find it to be quite as useful as expected. Because the camera offers very little vision past 10 feet behind you, or side to side, and eliminates depth perception, it’s really only good for seeing whether or not you will tap another car’s bumper when parallel parking. You’ll still need to look over your shoulder for a majority of the maneuvering, still need to eyeball the position of the tires relative to the curb, and still need to guess whether low-hanging pieces of your car like hitches or body panels will scrape against the curb when backing into one. These aren’t criticisms of Nextar’s implementation, only reasons to rethink whether you really need a backup camera. It’s a very limited tool.

Nextar’s camera offers fairly low but usable video quality, and a refresh rate that’s acceptable for the slow application. As for protecting children, the view the camera offers isn’t quite wide enough to account for the whole rear of the car, so we’re not sure it would pick up misplaced tots in every scenario, though it would certainly help. Be warned, though: it’s quite conspicuous on a license plate, so the possibility for theft or vandalism definitely exists.

Media Player

The media functions on the I4-BC felt like a complete afterthought, and treaded the border between barely functional and completely useless. The music player included almost none of the features we’ve come to expect from even the most basic models. It will pick up songs loaded onto a (not included) SD card, but offers no option for rearranging them, removing them, or even creating your own playlist. Whatever’s on the card is what’s playing. This is the kind of limited functionality we would expect from a $20 kid’s player from Toys ‘R Us, not a legitimate $260 device. While it technically works, all but the most easily impressed users will find it so limited as to be virtually useless. 

The picture viewer fairs a little better - but hardly. Besides taking about five seconds to load every single 4.1-megapixel test photo we loaded on, it scaled them very poorly, making the shrunken images appear pixilated and grainy, the way an image might look when zoomed out on in Photoshop (as opposed to actually resized in Photoshop.) Fortunately, zooming in fixes this problem, but of course, forces you to view only sections of your photos, and pan around them using a clumsy and inaccurate finger sliding motion. While the full-screen view made good use of screen real estate, Nextar offers no shortcut for getting out of it, meaning you must wait five seconds for it automatically pop back to the menu mode. And if you’re trying to show someone a photo with it, you’ll have to continually reenter full-screen mode to show off the photos in full.

All in all, we were extremely disappointed with the Nextar’s media player functionality, and couldn’t imagine using it in day-to-day life. Playing music and showing photos is a luxury – but without the luxury interface to make it enjoyable and easy, not many people will find it worthwhile.

Display Layout

While the 4.3-inch touch screen was easily navigable with finger presses and gave a decent bird’s eye view of the road, reading text while driving strained our eyes and driving skills to the max. Nextar engineers seem to have prioritized map area over space for text, so vital data, like which road to take next and how much time is left on the drive, ends up squashed into tiny horizontal bars at the top and bottom of the screen, which display text no larger than the average 12-point font on your computer screen. After mounting the unit several feet away on a windshield, reading the next road feels like taking an eye test. Not exactly what you want to be dealing with when you’re moving 70 miles per hour. 

Image Courtesy of Nextar

Points of Interest

Finding destinations with the Nextar’s preloaded points of interest felt a lot like trying to find them in a phonebook with half the pages ripped out. When looking for a spot to grab lunch, we breezed past dozens of eateries on a crowded boulevard without spotting them on the Nextar’s list of close restaurants. In the end, we actually gave up on using it and picked a spot the old fashioned way. Why the dismal results? Although the preinstalled Navteq data includes 1.6 million points of interest, which sounds like a lot, it actually doesn’t stack up to much in the world of GPS units. For instance, even Mio’s budget C220 unit has over 3.5 million POIs, and the higher end C520 has 6 million. By comparison, it’s no surprise than a unit with 1.6 million has trouble turning up destinations. 

GPS Accuracy

Despite lacking in some other departments, the I4-BC’s GPS capabilities were definitely up to par with what we’ve encountered in more expensive models. Our receiver got a fix in under a minute every time, performed well when not directly in the window, and seemed to peg our location quite accurately. When measured against a car’s digital speedometer, the GPS’ speed reading was consistently dead on, and even the estimated time of arrival was accurate. 

Say Again?

For a device that advertises its text-to-speech and media-playing capabilities so boldly, the audio quality on the Nextar sounds quite atrocious. Listening to this device read out directions at full volume is like running your eardrums against a cheese grater. The speaker sounds crackly and overdriven at full volume, but turning it down makes it too hard to hear in most noisy car environments. We were tempted to simply turn it off, but of course, with directions printed so poorly on the screen, that wasn’t much of an option either. A headphone jack provides some possibility of feeding the audio through your car’s speakers instead, but unless you have a line-in somewhere on your car radio, that won’t be happening, either.

Conclusion

Ease of use, an abominable windshield mount, and blisteringly bad audio were all sore spots for this system. For $260, the I4-BC would seem to offer a lot of bang for the buck, but unless you have a definite need for all the little extras Nextar has packed on board, you’re probably much better off paying the same price for a higher quality GPS without them.

Pros: 

• Affordable price
• Accurate GPS
• Functional backup camera
• Generous accessory bundle

Cons:
 
• Barely functional media player
• Cheap, overdriven internal speaker
• Confusing interface
• Difficult-to-adjust mount
• Complex backup camera installation