Group test: Satellite-navigation devices

We test 10 of the latest GPS units to hit the market

What on earth did we do before in-car satellite navigation (sat nav)? Did we simply drive around in an aimless fog until we eventually reached our destinations? Or did we ensure that we always travelled with an expert from Ordnance Survey permanently strapped into our passenger seat to feed us directions?

Whatever the case, sat-nav products are flying off the shelves at an astonishing rate. Despite a rather disingenuous recent Which? report that suggested we might all be better off sticking with an old-fashioned road atlas, sat-nav devices are currently being bought at roughly double the rate they were in 2005, while manufacturers churn out new models with similar enthusiasm.

Sat nav is available in a number of different forms, such as software for PDAs and mobile phone add-ons, but it’s the dedicated all-in-one standalone device that accounts for the majority of sales, which is why we’ve rounded up 10 of the very latest models to compare them for their range of features, accuracy, value for money and general usability.

All these devices are intended for mainly in-car use (rather than the handheld variety) and come as DIY kits that you can install (and remove) yourself without having to refit the entire interior of your vehicle. We also settled on a ceiling of £300, although within that prices fall as low as £199. So read on to find out which models allowed us to travel in comfort and style and which ones drove us round the twist.

This article is part of a group test of 10 satellite-navigation devices
See also:
Introduction
Acer p610
Garmin Nuvi 310
Magellan Roadmate 3050T
Medion Gopal PNA465
Mio Digiwalker C510E
Navman N40i
Novogo S700
Sony Nav-u NV-U50T
Tomtom One Europe
ViaMichelin X-950
A tables of features can be read via our pdf download above
Editor's Choice is on the next page

Editor's Choice

As with any technology, your choice of satellite-navigation product will depend on how you plan to use it. If you only travel in the UK by car for business reasons, you may not be bothered whether or not maps of obscure European territories are included in the asking price. To get to meetings on time, however, free traffic information services could be vital.

Holidaymakers might be in less of a hurry but could use a wider selection of maps and might be able to make use of extended points of interest (POI) and travel guide information.

In almost every instance, however, there’s no substitute for ease of use, simplicity and accuracy. We’re glad to see that full support for UK postcodes is fast becoming a standard feature at the sub-£300 price point. It might seem a small point, but postcode searches are so much quicker and simpler than wrestling with full addresses. We were also encouraged by the accuracy of the maps in our tests, encountering only a few instances where out-of-date data or duff directions threw a spanner in the works.

Selecting a winner in this instance was easy. With its bright, larger-than-average display, free traffic alerts and European maps, our Editor’s Choice – the Medion Gopal PNA465 – is streets ahead of the other road warriors in terms of features. It’s not just a question of ticking things off a checklist. The Gopal is also one of the easiest of all the GPS devices to get started with, both in terms of the software being intuitive to use and on a technical level, since the machine was quick to lock on to the GPS satellites. On top of all that, its shiny black finish makes it pretty good to look at and the £260 price isn’t particularly pricey for what you get.

Also worthy of Recommended awards are the Tomtom One Europe and the Mio Digiwalker C510E. If anything, it was even easier to get motoring with the Tomtom than with the Medion Gopal. Tomtom’s navigation software is still one of the best, despite the sudden flood of other products into the market. As it has been around for a while the price of the TomTom One has fallen noticeably too, although any savings you make will soon disappear if you want to add traffic updates or sign up for other TomTom Plus subscription services. Mio’s Digiwalker C510E, meanwhile, is an excellent low-cost option. And, with its free-for-a-year speed camera updates it has the potential to save some careless drivers an awful lot more money in the long run.

Create your own points of interest - Kelvyn Taylor

All the sat-nav units reviewed here come with an assortment of built-in categories of points of interest (POI) that can be handy when you’re looking for a filling station or a hotel for the night in an unfamiliar town. But what if you’d really like a POI database of, say, good pubs, WWII airfields, prime fishing locations, or some other category that you won’t find in the built-in data?

Realising that this is a boon for users, most new sat-nav models let you import your own POI information, and so the door is wide open to obtaining, or creating, your desired databases.

There’s no real industry standard format for these databases, but they contain the same basic information – a point’s latitude and longitude plus a name or description. But they’re not complex formats and are mostly text-based. Comma-separated variable (Csv) files are used by Navman and Garmin, but Tomtom uses its own OV2 format. Tomtom distributes a free command-line tool to convert files to and from this format.

Some brands are more problematic, with no supplied tools for creating custom POI files, and there are few free tools around, but for €30 (about £20), Point-Warner from www.navigating.de supports brands such as Medion, Mio, Sony and Navigon.

If you have the necessary location data in electronic format, it should be easy to export a file in the required text format – for Garmin and Navman it’s in the form [longitude], [latitude], [“name”]. Unless you have a niche requirement, you might find that others have done the donkey work for you.There are hundreds of sources of free POI files on the internet, but there’s no guarantee of their accuracy. One innovative way of quickly checking, creating or editing a POI database is by using a handy site called POI Editor – you can upload a POI file here and display a point’s location immediately on the integrated Google Maps viewer. If you choose, you can also make your POI file available for other visitors to edit or download.