NaviGadget

Delphi NAV200 review

Nov 8, 2006 gps navigation, reviews

Delphi’s one and only GPS navigation system NAV200 got an “OK” review from people at PC Magazine of UK. The bottom line was that the hardware stood their test OK but the multimedia capabilities was less than impressive. As a result Delphi NAV200 received 3 out of 5 which corresponds to a “good”.

The higly portable NAV200 is out there to gain some market share from the non-PDA, dedicated GPS navigation devices with multimedia support such as the Mio C710, Garmin nüvi 350 and nüvi 360. Delphi NAV200 also includes built-in games, calculator, world clock, and still manages to stay below $400.

The NAV200 has standard hardware that come with most other GPS systems such as the SiRF Star III GPS receiver and the 3.5″ touch screen. The navigation software on the Delphi NAV200 is Navigon’s Mobile Navigator which is a well-known company in Germany that produces navigation software meant to run on smartphones, PDAs, and portable navigation devices.

Multimedia features are also quite limited. When you plug in an SD card, the NAV200 scans it for all supported media types. For music, the player can handle MP3/WAV; for video, AVI. Unfortunately, playlists are out of the question. Likewise, the picture viewer is very simplistic. You’re limited to gif, jpg, and .png file formats, and there’s no option for a slide show and no provision for rotating pictures shot in portrait mode. Worse, the NAV200 took close to 25 seconds to downsize and sample some pictures shot on my 7-megapixel camera with file sizes of about 3.5MB. Even so, the video player played back video recorded at 320-by-240 quite well. When I tried to play back a clip recorded at 640-by-480, however, I got an error message that said it couldn’t play the file (Error—Lower buffer size).

Overall, if you don’t care so much about multimedia handling on a navigation system the Delphi NAV200 is there to provide good basic navigation at a great price.