Averatec Voya 350 Review
Sep 12, 2006 gps navigation, gps reviews, navteq
Averatec‘s first attempt to enter GPS navigation market – Voya 350 – got a decent review from pcmag. Priced at $380, this 3.5″ inch screen pocket sized GPS system does not lack any features.
The 1GB included SD card comes pre-loaded with Navteq maps for whole U.S and Canada, plus more than 1.6 million points of interests. Voya 350 is equipped with a SiRF Star III GPS receiver which promises to offer sensitivity and fast satellite-acquisition times.
As a result, the Voya 350 performed as well as other SiRF Star III devices I’ve tested, and I was able to track at least six satellites from the center of my office, 10 feet away from the window. On the road, the Voya 350 never lost satellite lock except, of course, in the Holland Tunnel.
Even though Voya 350 has a stub antenna that sticks out of it’s body it is still small enough to fit into your shirt pocket at only 0.8 x 4.5 x 2.9 inches and weighs 6 ounces including its 1,100-mAh lithium ion battery, which can power the unit for up to 4 hours.
Averatec included a safety (or money saving) feature in Voya 350 that automatically alerts you for speeding depending on the type of road you’re driving on. But keep in mind that the auto alert many not reflect the actual speed limit and should be used for reference only.
In my road tests, the Voya 350 presented no surprises. Both the shortest and the quickest routes generated to our test destination were exactly the same as those on the Navteq-based Garmin GPS devices. While it doesn’t support text-to-speech, the Voya’s voice prompts, available only in a single female voice, were complete. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Voya 350 supports multiple point destinations via its “stopover” feature. Multipoint routing is normally something you find only in more expensive devices.
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