Caught mappin’ with GPS
You probably have had a cellphone for 15 years and you’re on your third-generation digital camera. There’s a 46-inch LCD television in your family room and a laptop on every counter.
What’s left?
Obviously, if you don’t have a GPS navigation system for your vehicle, you’re at risk of being branded old school -- one of those people who frequent gas stations for directions. After all, 10 million Americans can’t be wrong, can they?
That’s the estimate of how many people will buy Global Positioning System navigation devices this year, mostly for their vehicles (hikers also use them, among others). These systems capture timing signals from a network of 24 Defense Department satellites and can calculate your precise position on Earth.
The GPS navigation devices store electronic maps of every highway and street in North America and use the GPS signal to direct you to any address you want.
Though I should be a prime candidate for one of these devices, given my travel to new cities at least every month for my job, I don’t have one.
Like a lot of others, I am obviously interested. I had a chance recently to test the NAV740, made by a unit of Ingram Micro, the electronics house based in Orange County. It doesn’t have a well-known name, like Garmin or Magellan, but it’s a new product loaded with features for a suggested price of $299.
Adam Diep, the Orange County engineer who designed this system, said it offers more features for less money than anything on the market.
As with almost every other GPS unit, the NAV740 allows you to program street addresses. It also contains a generous 11 million points of interest that you can quickly access, including franchise restaurants, hotels and sports venues. The NAV740 has a 4.3-inch, touch-sensitive color screen and a rechargeable battery that lasts about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours in normal use. Most of the time, I kept it plugged into my cigarette lighter.
It features voice-to-text prompts, meaning it not only gives you verbal instructions to turn right or left in so many feet but the street names you should be looking for. It does have an amusing tendency to mispronounce Spanish names, like too-junga for Tujunga Canyon Road.
Everybody I showed the device thought it was cool, useful and modern.
In my tests, I already knew where I was going, so I had to pretend I needed help from the NAV740. It generally was able to find good routes from work to home and even into some of the remote sections of the San Gabriel Mountains where I go on weekends.
It also has a few annoyances. A couple of times, it didn’t clear a route after I arrived at my destination and later assumed I was still trying to get there. When I canceled the route, the screen froze. Eventually, I figured out how to avoid that problem.
Programming these hand-held units or trying to read the map while driving is a big safety no-no. What all GPS devices need is voice recognition that will allow the driver to speak commands. Only a few very high-priced units, some over $1,000, have this feature and it still hasn’t been refined.
I don’t think the user interface on the NAV740 is as intuitive as a cellphone or digital camera. Many consumers are going to need instructions, which unfortunately run 86 pages on a compact disk. The information on programming routes appears on Page 67. All this should be boiled down to about 10 or 15 pages.
But the NAV740 has great features that became apparent after a week or two of trial and error. And a lot of people who have never learned to read a map need something like the NAV740.
David Hilgart, director of marketing for Rand McNally maps, acknowledges that his company’s sales of maps are slipping. Maps tend to be used more by older people, who know how to read them.
“For younger people, under 25, printed maps are becoming nonexistent,” Hilgart said. “But that doesn’t mean they are using GPS. Many of them are texting their friends and asking for directions.”
Hilgart, whose company produces the Thomas Bros. map books that were once ubiquitous in Southern California, added, “We are not anti-GPS. It is an outstanding technology. But they have limited ability to see the big picture.”
I agree. On my long daily drive to downtown L.A., I sometimes have to hop off the freeway and find surface routes. I want a large map with lots of detail. The 4.3-inch GPS screen, while generous for an electronic device, can’t compare with a 10-inch map.
The other issue with GPS in general is its potential to give bad directions. In my tests, the NAV740 didn’t send me in the wrong direction, but after 25 years of navigating downtown freeways and surface streets, I have a lot better idea of how to get around than this machine does.
“Nothing beats local knowledge,” said Jeffrey Friederichs, Ingram’s senior manager for global marketing.
The reality is that urban Southern California is way too big to have such local knowledge. I may feel comfortable in a half-dozen areas, but put me in Calabasas, Manhattan Beach or Fullerton and I may as well be on the moon. I can think of plenty of times I wish I had the NAV740. But until I’m ready to fork over a few hundred bucks, I’ll just grab my ratty, 20-year-old Thomas Bros. map book.
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