Harman Kardon Guide Play GPS-500
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The Harman Kardon Guide + Play GPS-500 features a stylish design and wide screen. It offers text- and voice-guided directions as well as music and video playback.
Harman International is a company of listeners. From the earliest days of high fidelity, Harman’s guiding principle has been the same: not technology for technology’s sake, but technology for the music’s sake.
Harman’s long-standing, commitment to technical excellence, product quality and industrial design, all stem directly from company’s passion for the music.
The GPS-500 doesn’t support text-to-speech functionality, and it takes the system a while to acquire a GPS fix. Directions weren’t always efficient.
Style and ease of use mark this basic portable navigation and multimedia device, but the Harman Kardon Guide + Play GPS-500 doesn’t offer the same smooth performance and efficiency of competing products.
Though Harman Kardon is more well-known for its home audio products, the company has made a push into aftermarket car tech, starting with the Harman Kardon Drive + Play 2 and now the Harman Kardon Guide + Play GPS-500. Merging navigation and multimedia into one device, the GPS-500 isn’t a bad first try. It offers a stylish and compact design with a beautiful and sharp wide screen. You get all the navigation basics, plus some multimedia extras.
What more do you want from a GPS unit than the ability to get you from A to B when you haven’t got a clue where you are or which way to go? Well, Harman Kardon is hoping that multimedia features will also feature highly on your shopping list as its new Guide+Play GPS-500 also features video and audio playback.
The music and video playback is an added bonus, but as we’ve said in the past, we’re a bit weary of its real-life practicality (for now, anyway). That said, if you’re looking for a basic and affordable GPS device, the GPS-500 isn’t a bad choice, but you’ll get smoother performance in the similarly priced Mio C520 or Garmin Nuvi 200.
Much like the company’s other products, the Harman Kardon Guide + Play GPS-500 is a stylish piece of technology. It’s sleek (4.6 inches wide by 3 inches high by 0.8 inch deep and weighing 7 ounces) and attractive, with a classic silver-and-black finish. The compact size will allow for easy portability between cars, and the unit comes packaged with a simple and secure vehicle mount.
The main attraction of the GPS-500 is its wide-screen 4-inch WQVGA display. The touch screen is responsive and features a 480×272-pixel resolution, so we enjoyed extrasharp text and maps.
As its name suggests, the Harman Kardon Guide + Play GPS-500 is designed for navigation and entertainment, but route guidance is the primary and most attractive function of this device. The GPS-500 is equipped with a Centrality Atlas II GPS chip and comes preloaded with TeleNav maps of the United States. Before hitting the road, you may want to dig into Route Options and Navigation Settings menus to set your preferences for route creation (shortest time or shortest distance), unit of measurement, avoidances, and so forth.
Tags: audio playback, competing products, excellence product, garmin nuvi 200, GPS Maps, gps unit, harman international, harman kardon drive play, harman kardon drive play 2, high fidelity, multimedia device, multimedia features, smooth performance, speech functionality, technical excellence, video playbackRelated posts
Posted on August 26th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: GPS Maps
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