Pda navagation software

Detailed Product Description. At a Glance Tel: Fax: Contact Person: Ms. Send your inquiry directly to us Send your inquiry to us. All rights reserved. Request A Quote. On the plus side, they seem to be logical ones, not technical ones.

The software did not crash or lock up on us, but the Microsoft engineers could have done better "use case" analysis. Here's what is probably a common scenario that we tested out: turn the Bluetooth device off while Destinator is running, or move out of the small 15 foot? Bluetooth range. Simple enough, huh? You'd expect that when you turned it back on, everything would straighten itself out after a few minutes.

On further investigation, the problem is that PocketPC automatically disconnects from the Bluetooth device when it can't find it, and does not automatically reconnect when it gets back in range. You have to go the Bluetooth Manager, find the device, and click on the "connect" menu choice. Happily, when you go back to Destinator, it automatically rediscovers the GPS receiver and you are back in business. How better to see if this stuff really works than to plop yourself down in a strange airport, turn it on, and see if you can find your hotel in another city 50 miles away?

That's what we tried, and for the most part, were successful. When we got into our rental car, we flipped on the Bluetooth receiver, tossed it up on the dash, opened up our PocketPC, connected to the GPS device, fired up Destinator, and we were in business. Within a few minutes, we had our current location displayed on the screen. We entered our destination address, asked for a route, and we got directions right from the parking space!

With this synchronised on your PC it ought to make for a great way of looking up addresses. You can manually tweak the layout so it will recognise it but this rather spoils the convenience factor of having it use your contacts database. Vocal instructions are clear and reasonable and as you approach a junction an icon flashes up on screen to indicate the direction that needs to be taken. If you veer off the route, the software recalculates without fuss.

The view zooms automatically as your drive but you can use the slider on the right hand side of the screen or the up and down on the Pocket PCs joystick button. So far as basic driving from A-B, the software does the job. The Text-to-Speech function proved to be disappointing as the robotic voice sounding muffled and unclear and not that pleasant to listen to compared to the default pre recorded voice.

You can also change the bar to show the ETA to your destination, your velocity, and your latitude and longitude. This runs near the bottom of the screen and below this are GPS related icons. The one of the left shows the status while the one on the right will go into the GPS setup so you can check its progress while connected.

Pressing it again displays each stage of the route across the whole screen and these can then be selected individually and viewed. You can also set certain roads to be avoided at all times, say if there are major roadworks you wish to avoid. An issue I found while navigating is that then when the GPS signal becomes weak the software tends to freeze. This means that it behaves much more gracefully when the signal temporarily goes down. This also works with the Destinator but has to be imported and converted to the correct format using the Destinator Console.

I also had trouble with the POI database with many entries I was expecting to find, such as Banks, not available. It also took me a while to realise that to get a POI category to show on the map you need to activate it, and this is done by selecting an eye like icon to the left. This can be set to an address of your choice, so you can always navigate there at the touch of a button.

Another touted feature is seamless cross border navigation. By comparison TomTom Navigator is much more immediate. Destinator is a well featured and powerful piece of software but the interface is quirky where is should be intuitive making it difficult to use at times.

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