NavOne 4500 from Cobra gets a bad review from PC Mag

Published on March 24th, 2006 in cobra, gps navigation, reviews


Talk about seeing the big picture. Cobra Electronics’ NavOne 4500 portable GPS navigation system ($929.95 direct) sports a 5-inch, 320–by-240 pixel touch screen that makes it a lot easier to see your desired route at a glance. The device includes a matchbook-size FM-based traffic receiver that (with a subscription to Clear Channel’s traffic data) lets you get live traffic reports for your area, potentially helping you to detour around delays. Unfortunately the NavOne 4500’s routing performance and its lack of routing options are disappointing.

The 4500 (also known as the GPSM 4500) has five dedicated buttons along the right-hand side of the screen. The top button is the power switch, which doubles as a brightness control. The center button will cause the 4500 to repeat the last instruction, and the bottom button takes you to the main menu. The two buttons surrounding the Speak button are for volume up and volume down. The hard drive on the 4500 comes with street-level maps preloaded for all 48 contiguous U.S. states plus Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada.

The 4500 comes with a suction-cup windshield mount and a traffic receiver that attaches to the mount with Velcro. Setup is quite simple: You just mount the bracket to the windshield, plug in the power adapter, attach the 4500 to the bracket, and power up. You may then select English, French, or Spanish for your voice-prompted directions. It gives those directions in a natural-sounding recorded voice, but only for numbered streets and highways. Unlike the Garmin 2720 and 2730, the 4500 does not support text-to-speech conversion (this allows a GPS to pronounce the full name of streets as part of its voice-prompted directions). read the full review

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One Response to “NavOne 4500 from Cobra gets a bad review from PC Mag”

  1. NaviGadget » Blog Archive » Cobra NavOne 2500 coming out August 2006 Says:

    [...] Cobra is coming out with a new navigation system device; namely the NavOne 2500. Compared to the NavOne 4500 this one is a little smaller in size but can compete with the 4500 functionality wise. This site plans to sell the NavOne 2500 starting this August for $700. Here are some of the specs: [...]

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