.KEYWORD routefinder
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Routefinder PNA: Windows CE guides the way
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY We’ve already seen the application of Windows CE in automotive technology with Clarion’s AutoPC. Now, Datus Inc., a subsidiary of Korean electronics giant Daewoo, brings advanced GPS navigation technology to your car with the Routefinder PNA 7000, the world’s first handheld auto navigation system. But is it an expensive yuppie toy or an indispensable navigation tool? Senior Technical Editor Jason Perlow gives you the scoop.
.AUTHOR Jason Perlow
Automotive technology has improved vastly over the last hundred years. While we’ve seen more and more fuel-efficient engines that greatly increase a car’s range and the four wheel drive that enables us to travel off-road and in harsh conditions, one central component of the automobile has remained pretty much the same — the navigation skills of the driver.
Yes, we have primitive tools to help us out. City maps and atlases are helpful for getting a general idea as to the location of your destination. Internet services such as MapQuest will provide a printout that will route you from door to door with reasonably accurate driving directions across the country. But both of these tools require time and planning to use effectively. Unless you know — absolutely — where you’re going and have directions on how to get there, you can’t just get in your car and drive somewhere spur of the moment.
The introduction of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and mobile computer technology over the last decade has enabled wealthy individuals, government agencies, and corporations to have access to sophisticated and costly in-vehicle navigation systems. The Windows CE-based AutoPC is the most recent example of this technology filtering down to the masses, but the limited success of AutoPC is partly due to the fact that it’s permanently mounted in your car and, at $1500, pretty expensive. What if you live in New York and fly to California and don’t know how to get around? In this case, an AutoPC is useless. Not to mention that having an AutoPC or other equally expensive dedicated navigation system installed in your car is akin to declaring open season in some parts of this country for vandals to break into your car and steal it.
.BEGIN_KEEP
.H1 Welcome to the 21st century
Enter Datus’ PNA 7000, the world’s first portable and the most affordable automobile navigation unit. Unlike the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)-based GPS solutions, the PNA, or Personal Navigation Assistant, is completely self-contained.
Resembling a Windows CE palm-sized PC on steroids and about the size of a brick, as shown in Figure A, the PNA 7000 contains a 12-channel GPS receiver, an AMD microprocessor and two PC Card Type-3 slots. The PC Card slots are used to accommodate the two map databases, Windows CE 2.X and routing software on removable SanDisk data cards. The data cards can be used in conjunction with a notebook PC or a PC Card card reader to upgrade the system software and the map database.
.FIGPAIR A The PNA 7000 resembles a Windows CE Palm-size PC on steroids and is about the size of a brick.
.END_KEEP
For storing the maps for the entire New York Metropolitan area, including Connecticut, Northern New Jersey, and Long Island, we were supplied with an 85MB card. Eventually, the PNA will be able to use IBM’s 340MB Microdrive for storing the entire road map of the United States. It’ll also be able to use a PC Card radio receiver for highway traffic updates in the near future — this feature is expected to be available by Q2 2000.
Setting the unit up in your car is easy — an optional mounting kit allows you to securely set the unit on top of your dash, but it’s also small enough to sit on the passenger seat or on the top of your car’s center armrest. The unit is powered using the cigarette-lighter adapter (or optional rechargeable battery) and receives the GPS signal with a detachable wire antenna that you feed through the rear window and magnetically mount on the roof of the car.
.H1 Interacting with the PNA
The PNA uses a 320 x 240 grayscale screen similar to those used on palm-sized PC units, but instead of a stylus for user input, it uses a telephone-style alphanumeric keypad and a set of four function keys that change their mode depending on what’s displayed on the screen. This layout bears a striking resemblance to the Multi-Function Display (MFD) units in the cockpits of advanced jet aircraft — military and civilian airline pilots should feel right at home. When you switch the PNA on, it takes about 15 seconds to boot the Windows CE OS and navigation software, after which the disclaimer screen appears. Press the Enter key to agree to the disclaimer that Datus, Inc. isn’t responsible if you get lost or have an accident while using their product, and you’re ready to go.
After passing the disclaimer screen, the PNA greets you with the current time using its voice synthesis capabilities (shades of Knight Rider and KITT!) and presents you with an options screen. Here you’re presented with four choices, as shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B After passing the disclaimer screen, the PNA greets you with the current time using its voice synthesis capabilities and presents you with four options.
Pressing the New Route key from any screen displayed on the PNA gets you back to this list of choices.
If you know the address of your destination, you can press F4, where you’re prompted, as shown in Figure C, to enter the destination address.
.FIGPAIR C If you know the address of your destination, you can select F4, where you’re prompted to enter the destination address.
You can enter the first few letters of the city name on the keypad using Tegic’s T9 system, after which you choose the destination city from a narrowed list by using the multifunction keys and pressing Enter. Next, you enter the street number and press the Enter key to confirm, after which you enter the street name using the same T9 input method, select from the resulting list, then press the Enter key.
Before calculating a route to your destination, confirm the start address that the PNA displays at the top of the screen by pressing the Enter key. This screen can be seen in Figure D. Your location is automatically determined using the GPS system and the map database installed in the unit.
.FIGPAIR D Before calculating a route to your destination, confirm the start address that the PNA displays at the top of the screen by pressing the Enter key.
Due to an intentional error factor put into the civilian GPS signal by the United States Department of Defense (we don’t want our enemies making weapons that can be used against us from easily obtainable civilian GPS receivers), the PNA may occasionally determine that your start address is located on a different street than your actual location. No problem. If your start address isn’t on the street listed at the top of the screen, you can select a nearby street from the list of streets on the screen, then press the Enter key to ensure the calculation of an accurate route. The PNA then automatically calculates turn-by-turn instructions to your destination.
If you don’t know the exact destination address, you can use the "Places to Go" feature shown in Figure E and choose from a list of over 40 different categories of places to drive to — including banks, ATM machines, restaurants, hospitals, police stations, auto repair shops, shopping malls, business establishments, hotels, and post offices. With the PNA, you can look up all locations within a category by city or find the nearest location within five miles. This is by far one of the device’s coolest features.
.FIGPAIR E If you don’t know the exact destination address, you can use the "Places to Go" feature and choose from a list of over 40 different categories.
I used this capability recently to navigate from my house to an obscure Spanish restaurant that I was told to go to on the recommendation of a friendly waiter. The restaurant is located in the heart of Newark, New Jersey’s Ironbound district, by far one of the most complicated urban areas in the country, with lots of badly-lit, narrow one-way streets. Newark is also a fairly high-crime area, so it’s not exactly the kind of place you want to get lost in, either. All I knew was that the restaurant was in Newark, and I knew the name of the place, Casa Vasca. While I could’ve looked Casa Vasca’s address up in the phone book and had the PNA route me to it that way, sure enough, the restaurant was listed in the PNA’s database when I pulled up Newark and I selected it from the list of restaurants.
The PNA gets its address and location information from a database supplied by NavTech (http://www.navtech.com/), the leading supplier of map, address, and highway data to places like MapBlast and to the various auto navigation system vendors. You can see how the map is broken down in Figure F, and if you take a look at the Datus Inc. Web site at: http://www.datusinc.com/metro.html you’ll see exactly how this map works.
.FIGPAIR F PNA breaks the US into continental US into 9 mapping regions.
The information that NavTech supplies is refreshed on a quarterly basis — this way the PNA can always remain current. Right now, NavTech has map information for most of the major cities in the continental United States, as well as certain parts of Canada. If you try to use your PNA in Alaska or Hawaii, however, you’re out of luck.
Certain private roads (like the road my condo complex is on) aren’t listed in the database, and obviously the unit won’t know of any roads that were recently constructed. We tried to get the unit to navigate us to a newly constructed mall in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and found ourselves completely off the map once we got to the closest exit. Navtech and Datus expect that by 2006 all the roads in the United States should be in their database, and they hope to begin working on maps for Europe and other parts of the world once they can get around localization problems and language issues in their software.
.H1 Getting there
Depending on the complexity of the route, it may take a minute or so before the unit has calculated all the turns and markers to your destination. My daily 33-mile trip back and forth to New York City from my house takes about 45 seconds to calculate, for example. But there’s no need to sit and wait — you can start driving while the route is still being calculated.
Once the route calculation is complete, the PNA begins prompting you to your destination. As you approach each turn, the PNA notifies you with all the information you need by voice and screen display to navigate the route to your destination. The PNA alerts you by voice to upcoming turns when you are less than one mile away, less than one-half mile away, and immediately as you approach each turn. After completing each turn, you’re immediately notified visually, as shown in Figure G, and audibly as to the distance and direction of the next turn. You can also repeat the last instruction and re-calculate the distance to the next turn by hitting the Enter key.
.FIGPAIR G After completing each turn you’re immediately notified visually and audibly as to the distance and direction of the next turn.
The PNA’s voice synthesis is pretty sophisticated, but it isn’t perfect. It uses text-to-speech, so it pronounces everything literally. If the text-to-speech algorithm doesn’t understand a word, it spells out each letter. For example, if the screen displays "Rt. 24" it will say "Ar-tee twenty-four" as opposed to "Route 24." You would think that the dictionary would understand common street name abbreviations, but it doesn’t. The speech engine also has problems with certain kinds of ethnic names — for example, one town in New Jersey, "Mahwah," which should be pronounced "Mah Wah," is pronounced "mwahhhhh."
The PNA also has a tendency to talk very fast, and will start jabbering like crazy if you have markers that are close to each other, even if you’re going straight on the same road. This happens on the New York City West Side Highway, where the actual name of the road changes very frequently (at least according to Navtech’s data). However, after using the unit for a few hours you do begin to understand its dialect. The nice thing is that if you get totally confused by what the PNA says you can still see the instructions on the screen or repeat the instructions.
When dealing with anomalies like tunnels, heavy foliage, and heavy urban areas with tall buildings, the PNA also does very well. This is due to the high quality 12-channel receiver built into the unit, which many handheld GPS units and PDA GPS accessories lack. When you’re in a tunnel, you lose GPS coverage, but this navigation software is able to compensate by locking onto the GPS signal when you emerge and putting you back on course.
If you miss a turn, you can hit the Re-route (F2) key and the PNA re-computes your route based on your current position. I’ve done this going 65mph on Interstate 287 in New York. I inadvertently missed an exit, and the PNA compensated just fine and generated an alternate course to my destination. This also comes in handy when I drive into Manhattan during rush hour and have to make choices concerning alternate routes into the city depending on traffic reports (such as determining whether or not to take the Lincoln or Holland Tunnel when approaching the New Jersey Turnpike).
While you’re driving you can access additional information about your calculated route by pressing Route Info (F3). The Route Info screen displays your speed, elapsed time since the beginning of the route, distance you’ve traveled from the start, and distance remaining to your destination, as you can see in Figure H. Meanwhile, at the same time you’re viewing this screen, all turn-by-turn voice instructions continue to be spoken as you drive.
.FIGPAIR H The Route Info screen displays your speed, elapsed time since the beginning of the route, distance you’ve traveled from the start, and distance remaining to your destination.
At any time, you may press the Map/Nav key to display a detailed street map of your current location, as shown in Figure I.
.FIGPAIR I At any time, you may display a detailed street map of your current location.
The white arrow on the screen indicates your current position on the map and points in the direction you’re heading. The PNA includes multiple map viewing options, including multiple zoom ins and zoom outs, show the entire route, show just the remainder of the route, zoom to the start location, zoom to the destination location, and zoom to the current location. Although the map is small in size, it’s particularly useful in giving you a visual idea of your route before you start driving or a diagram of your next few upcoming turns.
.H1 Useful tool or yuppie toy?
All of this stuff sounds well and good, but is it worth the expense? If you drive a lot, and are frequently in situations where you need directions, it’s a fantastic product. It works as advertised and is perhaps the most impressive example of automobile navigation technology on the market.
.CALLOUT It works as advertised and is perhaps the most impressive example of automobile navigation technology on the market.
.BEGIN_KEEP
The PNA doesn’t come cheap, however. On the average, a PNA setup will run you between $1,200 and $1,800, depending on the size of the memory card needed. You also have to factor in the expense of quarterly updates and a laptop computer or PC equipped with a PC Card reader. Keep in mind, however, that most dedicated navigation systems will run between $3,000-$5,000, and your basic AutoPC equipped with GPS and CoPilot will run you anywhere from about $1,500 and up. So, at an average of about $1,500 for a PNA, it’s not a raw deal. I expect that with advances in data storage miniaturization, near-future implementation of third generation wireless networks and the increase in demand for these types of products, the cost of similar units will drop down to under $1,000 over the next few years.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
The Routefinder PNA 7000 is currently available directly from DATUS at http://www.datusinc.com and will be re-sold by authorized AudioVox resellers in Q1 2000.
Compare with the AutoPC at: http://www/autopc.com/.
Look into NavTech, the leading supplier of map, address, and highway data to places like Mapblast and to the various auto navigation system vendors, at: http://www.navtech.com/.
For more information on CoPilot for the AutoPC, check out a Windows CE Power product review at: http://www.windowscepower.com/issues/issue199909/copilot001.html.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Jason Perlow is a contributing editor with Windows CE Power Magazine. When he’s not recompiling his Linux kernel or scouring the net for great Linux software, he can be reached at perlow@hotmail.com.
.END_KEEP
