NaviGadget

Pharos Drive 140 review

Dec 18, 2006 gps navigation, reviews

Pharos Drive 140 was recently reviewed by CNet (6.7/10) and today we have a review from PCMag which also gave the Pharos Drive 140 a ‘good’ (3/5) rating.

In addition to navigation, the Drive 140 has multimedia players for pictures, videos, and music. The device will automatically scan inserted memory cards for compatible content. Keep in mind that the 2GB card supplied is almost completely full so there’s only about 50MB available for your content. You can remove the SD card and insert a card with your own media, but you’ll lose navigation capabilities. I tested all three media players. Though the MP3 player played my tunes without incident, the picture viewer took a while to render each of the 3MB files from my digital camera, but it did display them properly. Because of the 16:9 format, I got vertical black bars on the left and right side of the screen when viewed in full-screen. I was pleased to see that the Drive 140 supported playback of WMV files because many other products play only the .AVI format. However, I was a bit disappointed in the playback; it seemed that every 4 or 5 seconds the video would jump a frame or two.

It sounds like Pharos Drive 140 is suffering from lack of processor/memory power to properly handle large multimedia files. This seems to be a problem for many GPS systems out there that throw in these feature to stay competitive in such a fast growing market.