.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Finding your way with the Pharos Pocket GPS Navigator
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY In this review, we review the Pharos Pocket GPS Navigator. Will it help you find your way? You’ll have to read this article to find out.
I’ll never understand how they do it. For some reason, though you know they’re nasty, the hotdogs you eat in Yankee Stadium while the Yanks pulverize the evil Rangers are better than any other hotdog you’ll ever eat, anywhere else.
Of course, to be able to chow down from the cheap seats, you’ve first got to get there. And that brings us to the heart of our story: the Pharos GPS and Ostia in-car navigation software.
If you’ve never used a GPS, you’re in for a treat. A GPS (or Global Positioning System navigator) is truly amazing. This little device, smaller than the palm of your hand, talks to a series of satellites in orbit around the Earth, constantly updating positional information.
That positional information, in the form of latitude and longitude, is fed into the navigation software. The navigation software adds a number of key components to the GPS in-car navigation formula. First, the GPS receiver itself knows where you are on the planet. By recording where you are now… and now … the computer connected to the GPS receiver can tell which direction you’re moving in, and approximately how fast.
Combine speed, location, and direction with a set of good maps, and you’ve got a ball game.
The best way to describe the Pharos hardware and Ostia software is to say it’s both absolutely amazing and an idiot savant. It’s really, really smart and really, really stupid, at exactly the same time. It works quite well, but you’ve got to work hard, along with it. I’ll tell you about that in a moment.
.BREAK_EMAIL Want to find your way through New York traffic? Tap your mouse here to get there.
.H1 The hardware
Let’s first talk about the Pharos hardware. I really like the design of this product, even though, at first, it seems clunky. The product consists of the little GPS puck shown in Figure A, as well as a number of cables and connectors.
.FIGPAIR A Amazingly, this little puck can talk to a satellite in orbit.
One cable plugs into the GPS receiver. One cable, shown in Figure B, plugs into the docking station port of your Pocket PC (providing both comms and power).
.FIGPAIR B This connector provides both data and power.
These cables plug in together, and then plug into a third cable that’s connected to the car’s cigarette lighter.
I like this design for a few reasons. First, there’s one small cable that’s unique to your model of Pocket PC (that’s what’s shown in the figure above). I tried this on an old Jornada 565, but if I decided to use a different Pocket PC, I could just get the replacement cable for that device and keep the rest of my GPS. That’s neat.
I also like it because it connects into my docking station port, leaving my Compact Flash slot open and usable for flash memory. That means I can stick as many maps into the system as my flash card can handle. Using a 256MB card, I was able to get all of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, southern New York (including all of New York City) northern Delaware, and bits of Maryland.
While the cables do tend to flop around in the car, as shown in Figure C, I’m really happy about keeping my CF slot open for map memory.
.FIGPAIR C While the extra cables are a bit annoying, I like the flexibility of this design.
This will become less of an issue as more and more devices work with Bluetooth, but I still like it — and I like that the cabling system powers both the GPS receiver and the Pocket PC with one cigarette lighter adapter.
.H1 The GPS mounting bracket
As you can see in Figure D, I’ve mounted my Pocket PC on a mounting bracket that attaches to the windshield. This device is also available from Pharos, but I actually bought mine from PC Connection, not aware initially that it, too was a Pharos product. It’s about $20 and well worth buying.
.FIGPAIR D This bracket holds the Pocket PC very securely.
The bracket actually consists of two pieces, the part with a flexible pipe and a suction cup that attaches to the windshield and the bracket that holds the PDA. I was quite impressed with how well the suction cup held.
There was one aspect of the mounting bracket that really bothered me (and, remember, I’m an engineer, so I get bothered by stuff most people wouldn’t care about). The suction cup/pipe assembly attaches to the mounting tray assembly through a T-shaped bracket, shown in Figure E.
.FIGPAIR E Look closely at the notched section at the left of the image.
The way the product was shipped, the top of the T (the bar across) was on top. This meant that if there wasn’t enough friction between the pipe section and the tray section, it could fall off. I decided to fix this, so I unscrewed the four screws shown on the back of the mounting tray in Figure F, and flipped the bracket around.
.FIGPAIR F I fixed it so the weight of the device made the connection more secure, not less.
It took about 5 minutes and has subsequently allowed me to feel very self-satisfied.
.H1 The software
We’ve given this software some serious road testing. First, we took it down to Florida and had it map our way from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando and back to Fort Myers. More recently, we’ve been using it to navigate into New York City and longer trips into Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and here in New Jersey.
Our review process here at ZATZ is often different from most other tech magazine publishers. We go out of our way to make sure that the we have devices we review on hand for quite some time. This was very important for this review, because the GPS system’s performance was measurably different on the wide, open road driving of our Florida trip from the instant, where-the-heck-do-we-go-right-now driving of downtown New York City. We’ve been using this device on and off for about four months, and regular use definitely helped give us a better feel for its strengths and weaknesses.
Overall, we were able to find our way when using the software, but sometimes with some serious stress. The main screen of the Ostia software is shown in Figure G.
.FIGPAIR G Here’s the main screen of the Ostia navigation software, with some helpful callouts.
The largest section of the screen is the navigation map. When traveling, the software zooms in or pulls out the map depending on how fast you’re driving. So, if you’re booking up a highway, you can see quite a bit of distance. But if you’re driving more slowly on local roads, your visible distance is quite a bit less, but the detail is more measurable.
We found this auto-scaling feature to work sporadically. In fact, on one exit, trying to get onto the Major Deegan in New York City, it jumped from long view to local view to long view again, all in about 10 feet of travel.
Also on the map is your computed route. When you set up your trip, you specify where your destination is going to be (more on that later), and the program will calculate your best route. The light blue line on the map is that route. That light blue line will prove critical when you’re driving.
Moving down the screen is an information bar. On the left is an indicator that generally tells you what direction you’re going to need to head next, and about how far away that is. In the figure above, it’s showing a left turn in 0.19 miles, onto Elysian Park Avenue.
Complementing all this is a pleasant woman’s voice telling you important details about your travel, like "Left turn ahead" or "Highway intersection ahead," or our favorite: "You are off-route." She can be pretty stern when you’re off route, but if you happen to make a turn correctly, you’re rewarded with a very nice pavlovian bell.
.H1 You are off route
One thing I really like about this product is that if you do get off route (let’s assume you took a wrong turn or simply decided to go a different way), after about a quarter mile, the software will decide to recompute your route to the destination from your new location.
The recompute process can take a minute or so, and sometimes you’ll need to just keep going in a random, but consistent direction before the software catches up with where you’re going, but it does, eventually, get you back on route.
As technologically impressive as this is, in practice, this recompute delay can be a serious problem. As you might imagine, driving an extra minute or an extra mile or so in New York City before the system picks up on it can change everything. In fact, you can be in a totally different part of Manhattan, driving on a road hard to extract yourself from, when Ostia finally catches up.
We found ourselves, a number of times, yelling at each other with this script:
"Where do I go?"
"I don’t know!"
"Well, what does the GPS say?"
"It’s not saying anything…" and getting more and more frustrated as we got deeper and deeper into unfamiliar territory.
It does catch up, though. On our trip to Yankee Stadium, we took a wrong turn and wound up going up the Major Deegan in the wrong direction. The software started complaining about being off route, the little green arrow wound up pointing in completely the wrong direction, but the little blue route path on the map had it right. The GPS did find us a safe U-turn and got us going back down the Major Deegan in the correct direction.
This, though, illustrates some of the idiot savant aspects of the software. While the blue mapping path was correct, the green arrow was wrong, and the disembodied voice just simply repeated, over and over, a disapproving "you are off route."
Once you get used to it, though, and realize that Ostia’s both brilliant and stupid, you can generally interpret her intentions and get back on the road in the right direction.
Sadly, the reason we were going in the wrong direction was that Ostia decided to do a map scale update right in the middle of one of the most complex sets of intersections coming off the George Washington Bridge. As a result, we had absolutely no navigation support during the two or three most critical turns that would get us to the ball park.
I need to be clear though: this product is still pretty amazing, despite its rough spots. And there are more rough spots.
.H1 Finding your destination
Don’t expect to be on the road and use the GPS with Ostia and your Pocket PC to dynamically choose a new destination. The process of locating and entering destinations is exceedingly painful. First, you have to choose a street. Once the huge list of streets loads, then you choose a city.
This is stupid. There might be a hundred Main Streets in the mapping database, but only one in Piscataway. Why you can’t choose the destination city first, and then the streets is beyond me.
Second, the street names are a bit difficult. For example, we wanted to go into the city, to West 42nd Street. The mapping software only knew of it as 42 W. Sometimes it likes RT for route, sometimes RTE. Sometimes, you’re going to US 22, sometimes to RTE 22, and sometimes to US-22. If you don’t guess the street correctly, it won’t find it.
Obviously, they bought their map database from some other company, but the inconsistencies are incredibly annoying.
Here’s another inconsistency: according to Ostia, Piscataway, NJ doesn’t exist. Oh, it knows that something’s in Somerset County, but has no record of Piscataway. I never liked the town, anyway. Strange place. Better off gone.
.H1 Loading maps
The key to finding your destinations is to load them up before you leave the house. The best way to do this is to load the included MapFinder software onto your PC, and do all your searching while both connected to MapFinder and the Internet, using a combination of MapFinder, Mapquest, and Yahoo’s direction service to find the right spot on the map, and then program it into Ostia.
You can load as many maps onto your memory card as you can fit. Like I said above, I got quite a few loaded onto 256 meg. However, you can only load ten maps into the internal memory of the handheld, and you have to make sure you load the right maps for the route. For example, if you’re going from New York City to Philadelphia, you’re going to need to go through a number of New Jersey counties. You better make sure to figure out which maps those are and have them loaded as well, or you’re just not going to make it.
Finding and loading those maps is harder than it needs to be, but it is doable.
.H1 Our secret shopper experience
Sometimes we get loaner units in from the developers, but sometimes we also go out and purchase products to review, to see what the real consumer is experiencing. We did this with Pharos. We purchased a Pocket GPS Navigator for HP Jornada 500 Series product from PC Connection. It came in and we started installing it.
We were shocked to find that the package contained Ostia software and maps from 2001. Apparently, the box had been sitting on the shelf for nearly three years! A phone call to Pharos technical support was handled moderately well. We were told that if we faxed in our sales receipt, they’d give us download access to the new software and maps. However, when we got online, we found that to download the maps for the entire U.S., you had to download individual county maps for every county in the country. There was no single-file download to get the update.
Getting the entire country would take us hours and hours (not something your typical editor has in extra supply). Figure 50 states with 20+ counties in each, and you’re talking 1,000 individual file downloads!
When we requested Pharos either make available a large download or send us update CDs, we were informed that since we didn’t purchase the product directly from Pharos, we’d have to purchase the CDs at the full price of the product (nearly as much as the PC Connection purchase price, which included the out of date map CDs). Further, the technician suggested we might consider keeping the item we purchased from PC Connection and then additionally purchasing the CDs from Pharos because, to paraphrase him, it’d still be cheaper than buying a current package of both CDs and GPS from Pharos.
Needless to say, PC Connection claims their stock is newly provided by Pharos, and of course, Pharos tells us that they never ship out-of-date stock. And yet, we found out-of-date stock and and also found that Pharos was unwilling to solve a legitimate and verifiable customer service problem!
Eventually, we did identify ourselves as from Computing Unplugged and they did send us the updated software. I was very disappointed. Given that a set of CDs costs, oh, fifty cents, it was very poor and very scarcity-conscious customer support. Had we not been press, we would have returned the product to PC Connection and simply bought a competitors’ product.
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In fact, we did return the product to PC Connection and PC Connection gets kudos for exceptional customer service and a solid, easy, no hassle return process.
.H1 Bottom line
So, what’s the bottom-line on the Pharos Pocket GPS Navigator? Well, first and foremost, it does work, although with some definite quirks. The fact that it runs on a Pocket PC with only 32MB of internal memory is a plus. And, once you get used to Ostia’s quirks, you can find your way.
Additionally, the hardware flexibility is nice, and only needing one cigarette-lighter adapter along with keeping the Compact Flash slot free did earn the product points.
On the negative side, although their customer support was pleasant and courteous, a legitimate purchase backed up by a receipt showing, definitively, that the product was purchased just days earlier resulted in us being told that we’d have to pay full price to buy the current CDs, just to be able to use what we’d legitimately bought from an authorized reseller. There’s just no excuse for that!
On yet another hand, at under $200 (assuming you get all the current parts), you do get an awful lot of bang for your buck.
So, do we recommend you buy this product if you want an inexpensive in-car navigation system for your Pocket PC? The answer is, provisionally, yes. The product does do the job. That said, we’ll be looking at other GPS products to see if any do the job with a bit more grace.
Whenever we have a product review with a whole lot of "on the other hands," the resulting rating tends to be a 3 out of 5. As Managing Editor Denise Amrich says, "It’s better than nothing. It’s vastly better than nothing."
.RATING 3
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on the Pharos Pocket GPS Navigator, visit http://www.pharosgps.com.
For more information on the PDA mounting bracket, visit http://www.pharosgps.com/products/accessories/Navigation_Accessories/PX001.htm.
For more information on PC Connection, visit http://www.pcconnection.com.
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.BIO
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