HP iPAQ 310 Travel Companion
`Creating a route is the most important part of any GPS. The iPAQ 310 does that via the Go To function where you can enter an address, a Point of Interest, create a route with multiple destinations, or you can use a stored route and give it another starting point. If you enter a location and don’t know the exact street number, you can simply select street center or an intersection. All of this sounds logical and reasonable, and the iPAQ 310 certainly looks like a great Travel Companion.
the iPAQ 310 Travel Companion is the first iPAQ in recent history that does not use an Intel/Marvell PXA processor. Instead, it is based on a Centrality/SiRF Titan navigation processor. The Titan is a CPU designed specifically for navigation applications. It uses an ARM11 RISC core, a high-speed DSP (digital signal processor) core, and hardware GPS accelerators.
Though the HP iPaq 310 Travel Companion doesn’t offer a remarkably different design than other portable navigation systems, it’s still one sleek device. It sports an attractive dark plum chassis and black soft-touch finish on the back, making for a handsome addition to any car interior. The iPaq 310 also has a slender profile (4.3 inches wide by 3.4 inches high by 0.7 inch deep; 6.6 ounces) so you can easily transport it between vehicles or pack it in your suitcase for use with a rental car while on a trip.
* The good: The HP iPaq 310 Travel Companion is a sleek portable navigation system with a gorgeous screen, text-to-speech functionality, and integrated Bluetooth. It also displays 3D building renderings and has multimedia capabilities.
* The bad: The iPaq 310 was pretty awful at route recalculations, and the voice prompts weren’t very loud or clear.
* The bottom line: Despite a sleek design and an attractive feature set, the HP iPaq 310 Travel Companion shows an ugly side with inaccurate route recalculations and poor voice directions that makes us say pass for now.
The HP iPaq 310 Travel Companion was built from scratch and no longer uses TomTom’s navigation software. Instead, it uses HP’s own navigation software and comes preloaded with TeleAtlas maps of the United States and Canada.
As with most portable navigation systems, you can get directions to a specific address, a point of interest (POI), a location from your Favorites or recently visited list, or your home address. Once you’ve entered your destination, routes can be calculated in several methods, including shortest, fastest, and most economical, and you can instruct the system to avoid certain road types and maneuvers, such as highways, toll roads, and U-turns.
There will also be an iPaq-dedicated Web site where you can plan your trips beforehand and then send them the iPaq 310. This is a nice option if you have time to preplan your journey since you can take advantage of your computer’s full screen and keyboard to enter all the information. Unfortunately, this feature was not live at the time of this writing, so we couldn’t check it out.
HP says the site should be ready for public use by late November but didn’t give a specific date. Other navigation goodies include automatic route recalculation and safety camera warnings.
Tags: attractive feature, different design, exact street number, GPS Guide, handsome addition, hp ipaq, navigation applications, poor voice, portable navigation system, portable navigation systems, speech functionality, speed dsp, travel companion, voice directionsRelated posts
Posted on August 28th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: GPS Guide
Leave a Reply