Listen to the voice. Not the voice(s) in your head, but the commanding, navigating voice.

I didn’t listen to the voice at first, “Turn left in 200 yards and then bear right“. I knew the way home from work, and wanted to drive my normal route. Eventually the voice was giving the directions I was driving.

It was a totally different matter when we went away for a long weekend to Cape Cod. Then I had no choice but to listen the computerized voice of the GPS, especially after getting lost following a map and some printed directions.

No GPS device is perfect, and it takes a bit of time to get used to the workings and limitations of a device, even one as highly rated as the HP iPaq rx5915 Travel Companion. The HP iPaq rx5915 does not have a text to speech option, which means it does not announce street names. As long as you are paying attention to the screen, you can see the name of the street anyway.

There were a few times when I could have done with a “Where am I?” option to tell me where I was, and not just where I was going.
The Tomtom GO 720 GPS actually has this feature, along with voice-guided turn-by-turn directions and a map-sharing function for the most up-to-date maps.
It doesn’t function as a handheld computer or have Wi-Fi though…

Posted on June 25th, 2008 by mervyn