NaviGadget

i-mate PDA-N GPS Pocket PC

Feb 1, 2006 gps navigation

They’ve been bustier than Jock McHasty in a rush at i-mate, as the PDA/smartphone vendor releases another addition to their range, the i-mate PDA-N – the company’s first GPS PDA.

Aimed at swivel-action business types and people who sit in cars all day (sorry, “road warriors”), the PDA-N positively bristles with connectivity, including built in GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

The units come with Skype pre-installed, letting users make free VoIP calls over wireless connections.

Running on Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Edition, the PDA-N comes bundled with the full Office Mobile suite and runs on a 300MHz Samsung processor.

The front of the slim device is dominated by a 2.83″ 240×320 pixels transmissive TFT-LCD screen supporting 64k colours, with a row of four buttons and a joystick below.

Unusually, there’s no camera onboard (least not one we could see), but there’s a fair range of multimedia support onboard, with the device able to play back WAV, WMA, AMR, and MP3 music files, as well as M-JPEG/WMV video files.

Onboard memory is a bit skimpier than we would have liked – just 128MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM – but there is a SDIO/MMC expansion slot available.

According to I-mate, the PDA-N notches up a rated battery life of 5 hours in GPS mode and 8 hours playing a looped video.

The PDA is scheduled for release in April. read