GPS Sat Nav Systems

Acer is one of those companies that have its fingers in a lot of pies and it does not come in as a surprise to know that it offers GPS devices, even though it is not one of the brand leaders. You might be aware of the fact that TomTom dominates the market, mainly because of its usual excellence in its set of features and performance. However, since Acer has its own dominance among corporates, the IT managers might consider the Acer navigation systems for its roaming workers.

The previous two GPS from Acer, the d150 and N35 were not particularly impressive or even satisfactory for that matter, and it seems to be a third time lucky case. While both the d150 and N35 were functional, they had poor build quality and feel and the software included in both of them, were not anywhere near user friendliness.

Design:

Cool looking:

As far as the design is concerned, the Acer P660 Portable GPS Navigator is a huge step forward from the awful D150. The P660 is undeniably good looking with is pleasing four inch wide screen display and being sleek, it can be even compared with TomTom’s 510. It is pocket friendly too; how can it not be with the dimensions of (H x W x D) 23 x 81 x 116 mm and weighs just 195 grams. Since GPS device is pretty much number one in the list of things stolen from a parked car, your pocket is where you want your GPS to be as soon as you leave your car. We aren’t just impressed with the P660’s weight or its dimensions, but its angular corners along with the buttons too are very impressive enhancing its overall design.

Navigation:

Just beneath the display, you get to see the chunky and easy to manoeuvre +/- controls for volume along with a smaller button labelled “Navi” sandwiched in between. The Navi button allows you to switch between the main navigation software and the main controls. The buttons are backlit and so, they light up when pressed or permanently plugged in.

Ports and connectivity:

In the bottom edge of the device, there is a mini USB port used for charging that is hidden by a plastic cover along with a connector for an optional car mounting kit. Bordering this port you get to see two slider switches that comes in handy with both hard and soft resetting of the gadget. Though it was stated that there is a stylus offered with the package, we did not find one in there; or we might have missed it. Anyways, make sure that you have something with which you can access these switches; because, if your device freezes up in middle of a journey, you will just be stuck. This was a common issue in the very first model, but ever since the firmware update, it never occurred again.

On the top edge of the Acer P660 Sat Nav device is the power button that is placed sensibly placed bang in the middle, with a headphone connector in one corner along with a connector for an external GPS aerial the other corner, in case you would require it. Since both of these are covered with hard flaps, you will not even know that they are there. At the rear, there is a speaker which is reasonably loud and clear.

Memory and Maps:

There is a SD card slot on the right hand side, along with a 256MB card supplied that contains the CoPilot Live maps for UK and Ireland. Street-level maps for the UK and Ireland are included, but only the major roads of Europe. It is would be advisable to not get persuaded with satnav’s fed with major roads, as it is the smaller roads that require more guidance and that is exactly where you are likely to drive for the most part of your journey. Maps for Europe are also offered on CD and you will be able to transfer them over to the SD card by hooking up through the USB cable. However, if you want more than the United Kingdom on the card at the same time, you will have to purchase a larger SD card; and this is no hardship considering how cheap they are these days.

Set-up:

The very slim and lithe impression of the receiver unit will be totally lost when you try attaching the bulky windscreen mount, plugging in the power and connecting the TMC aerial that needs to be attached with two petite suckers and route bordering the windscreen. It looks a complete mess and to cap it all, there are a few performance woes too, about which you will see later.

User Interface:

CoPilot 6:

The Acer p660 Satellite Navigation System is equipped with the Premium edition of CoPilot, which can be launched from the main screen. From the home screen, the built-in photo viewer, MP3 player and contact database can also be accessed. There are five program icons on the main menu panel that includes Navigation, MP3, Photos, Contacts and Settings.

Via settings, languages, backlight settings and date and time can be managed. Strangely, the volume can also be accessed from here, but what we do not understand is, why would anybody take the trouble to delve deep into the settings to adjust the volume? But, the menu also provides you with the option to turn off the screen tap sound. The CoPilot offers full seven digit postcode support for the UK, which is very essential and another benefit of this top end P600 series device is the bundled TMC receiver. Software wise, the mapping data is offered by Navteq, which is a premium option.

More like a PDA:
The set of additional abilities of Acer P660 apart from navigation is a clear indication that it is based on Windows Mobile 5.1. But, we wonder if anybody would really want to carry around images on their GPS device. The photo interface is hardly of any use as it is not that intuitive as you have to manually select each thumbnail to get it to display each of them in a slideshow; it does have some funky transactions though. The MP3 player is quite basic, but with the device being sleek and coupled with a headphone socket, it is just about feasible to imagine that you might use it as an MP3 player.

One thing about the device that impressed us straight away is its display quality as its colours are very vibrant. First time that CoPilot navigation software is fired up, it runs through a brief tutorial to get started. It might not strictly hold on to its Pocket PC credentials, but it has to be said that it still remains an easy to use gadget.

Menus and screens:

The PDA optimised interface will be reminded in many of the screens with a number of options. To get to all the options, you have to make use of the scroll bar on the right hand side down. And again, this kind of a set up makes sense on a PDA, but not on this device. On the TomTom navigator, you have to move left and right to access further via large, easy to use icons and not up and down through the awkward to hit arrow keys. Despite these shortcomings, as long as you are not attempting to use it on the move though the Acer is still quite reasonable to navigate once you have got to grips with it.

The interface of the Acer P660 is quite impressive. You will find a list of favourites and a return trip button which what it says on the tin and directs you back from where you came, without you having to key in a location. Something that really impressed us was, when you attempt to route to an address when you do not have GPS coverage, it asks if you would like to route from your last location or to just wait for a GPS signal. How Polite of it?

Customisable:

The onscreen display is excellent with highly customisable sections that are placed underneath the map that is capable of displaying information such as the name of the road that you are on, the destination, the current time and your ETA. The actual 3D display is reasonably clear with a blue arrow for your car over a red line displaying the route. And the widescreen display means that there is room for a next turn arrow on the left side of the screen with plenty of room for the map on the rest of the screen. A safety mode comes in replacing the map view with a simple arrow and instruction and this can be set to kick in at a speed of your choice.

Navigation:

Plotting a trip on the Acer 660 Sat Nav is quite straight forward. Just press the New Trip button and then you can enter the address or search through the all important post code. From this menu, you can also choose from a recent list. Most people under estimate the value of the ‘Recent list’; it eliminates the hassle of re-entering the addresses again if it is already available in the list.

There is a Menu button that sits at the bottom left, which then pops up vertically and offers you with access to other functions such as Views. From the Views menu, you can choose to view 3D modes or itinerary that shows you each stage of your journey in text mode and choose to avoid parts of it. In the same screen there is a Mode button that allows you to switch between Guidance, Planning and Walking mode. Unfortunately, the Planning mode seems to be a bit difficult to use, while the walking mode did not really do anything to speak off. While it shows the path to where we were going in a large thick pink line, but whenever we tested it in this mode, our location did not change.

However, the biggest limitation is the lack of a pre-trip planning mode. You cannot enter a “travel from” location, which means you cannot see how far or how long a trip will take until you get a GPS fix at the place you want to depart from.

Extract addresses:

Yet another way of entering the destination is via the Contacts tab, which extracts the addresses out of the vCards. ActiveSync software is offered by Acer and we dreamt of transferring all our contacts from Outlook, but irrespective of what we did, the ActiveSync did nothing even though it was able to recognise Acer and sync. In order to get the contacts on to the device, we had to copy them on to an SD card as vcf files and then manually import them; the whole process was very clunky. Surprisingly, Acer was able to successfully pull out the addresses and allowed us to plot the route. This is the first time that we have seen a pocket PC based GPS exhibit such a feature.

QWERTY keyboard:

If you intend to enter the address manually, then you will get a non QWERTY keyboard that fills the large display. However, to enter the numbers, you have choose the numbers tab and wait for the numbers screen to come up. This is the way the regular Pocket PCs work, but is simply makes no sense on a GPS when you are entering a postcode and have to switch between the numbers and letters. It was also disappointing to see the system responding sluggishly when entering the addresses. All these factors together make the process very tedious and almost impossible to do so when the car is on the move, as you would spend too much time on looking at the display and you will most likely crash, totally unacceptable.

Clumsiness:

The slow responsiveness of the device while entering address might be mainly because of the smart address system, which predicts what you will be entering next. So, when you enter a postcode, it enables only the letters that could possibly follow it. Though it seems to be a very neat trick, you will have to pay for it with a sluggish response. After each and every selection, you have to click over the next button, which is even more annoying. The next button is an elongated one, but is surrounded by other buttons, so it is very easy to miss it off and muck things up, making the overall process take much longer than intended. Overall, it gives the impression that the user interface is optimised to be used with a stylus on a PDA and is just not for the fat fingers in a car.

Features:

Moving on to the internal features of the Acer P660 GPS, it is powered by the 400MHz Samsung S3C2440A processor and also sports 64MB of RAM for system memory and another 64MB for the OS. Yeah! We can hear you saying, it is almost as though it is a Windows Mobile powered PDA; we thought so too. Its GPS Chip is the ubiquitous SiRFStar III.

Point Of Interest:

The Point Of Interest database works in a different way to the sat nav systems that we had tested before. Rather than moving exclusively through the categories, the best way to search for the place you are looking for is to search for what you are looking for, and then narrow the search down to ‘looking near a city’. There are categories too, but rather than presenting them all in a drop down menu, you can only view them one at a time; the idea is extremely poor. For instance, For instance, if you are hunting for a garage or an airport you need to scroll down a given list after which you will have to narrow down the category by choosing a prospective candidate from the given list. Then again, the info provided is limited to just a contact number, which means you are on our own when it comes to hunting an eat out in some strange town, you will find you are on your own. However, with perseverance, we managed to get the Acer P660 get it to locate all the numerous locations we searched for, so we cannot be too critical. It is all in there, it is just that it is a pain to find it.

Traffic Message Channel:

Another feature that most people will be interested will be the Traffic Feature. For Acer 660, this feature is provided by the TMC add on. When you plug in the receiver into the bottom of the device, the power cable then goes into that. The Traffic Message Channel’s signals are broadcasted over FM radio, which the GPS unit can pick up and integrate into your planned route, automatically re routing you around the blockages. It sounds really great in theory along with the advantage over TomTom Traffic in that you do not have to subscribe to a traffic feed. However, we encountered two major issues with it; first of all, in addition to requiring an external TMC receiver, you will also have to run an aerial cable round the edges of your windscreen. The suction cups offered are rather puny and it is awkward to fit and frankly unsightly. Secondly, it just does not work that well. Though it managed to take some reports the first day, it failed to pick up other a major incident that was being announced on all the Traffic news reports. We simply would not trust it to really help me on a long term basis.

Speed Camera Alert:

As expected, the Acer P660 has also got a speed camera database. This is shown with a yellow box that reports the speed limit and your current speed along with a distance count down. Overall, it has been done nicely, but, unfortunately, it was not up to date and was missing several cameras that we passed.

Managing Contacts:

Tap on contacts tab of the main menu to get the contacts screen where you will be able to view, create and edit contacts. As we had mentioned earlier, you can then use this later to find this contact’s address quickly on your GPS device, or send panic information to these contacts through your Bluetooth enabled phone.

Bluetooth:

To access the Bluetooth options, tap on the Bluetooth icon in the top right hand corner of the Main Menu Screen. You get the options of Bluetooth Enable, Connect Mobile and Dial. To activate or deactivate Bluetooth, tap the Bluetooth Enable button. To use your Acer device as a speakerphone for your mobile phone, tap Connect mobile. The Bluetooth must be enabled, and phone must be paired with device. To make a call from your device, tap Dial and A keypad will then appear on screen. Use the keypad enter a number, then tap Dial and when this call is ended, your device will still be paired with your phone, and will continue to act as a speakerphone, until you disable Bluetooth.

MP3 Playback:

There is a MP3 icon in the main menu and, when it is tapped, an MP3 screen appears.

Just tap on the tracks that you want to play and tap the play button to play the tracks. The media player screen appears and the first song begins to play. The MP3 player application has the basic operations of play, pause, skip forward, skip back, adjusting volume, changing the order of tracks, repeating tracks, browsing for tracks and deleting a track.

Photo viewer:

Tap on the Photo tab in the main menu and you will get the photo viewer screen which allows you to view either individual photos or slideshows on your device. You will find the photos in folders. Tap on a photo to highlight it and then tap on the play button to view them.

In the photo viewer application too, you get all the basic operations like zoom in and out, previous and next photos, browse photos, view full screen photo, slideshow and rotate photo. To copy a photo or photos from the SD/MMC card to the device, tap on the photo that you would like to copy and tap on the folder button. Browse to the place where you would like to paste the photo(s), then tap the folder like button again. The photos will then be copied to this place.

Battery:

The only disadvantage of the thin dimensions of the P660 is that, as a result, the battery cannot be huge. It is just a 1200 mAh Lithium ion battery and you would get a battery low message just after three hours. If you wish to make use of the TMC receiver that is available in the P660, you will have to keep the device plugged in with the car lighter socket charger.

Package:

Inside the package, you will find a carry pouch and a mains adaptor that helps you justify the price, but the CoPilot software puts the Acer out of the running. The other package contents include car mount, car holder, charger, wall charger and USB cable. Acer offers accessories options of an External GPS antenna and External TMC module with antenna.

Verdict:

Acer keeps persevering with sat nav and the good news is that, the products are getting much better. The p660 is thin, light and good looking, but is also a bit sluggish. Our overall experience with the Acer P660 GPS device was quite enjoyable. It did its principle job and got us to destinations that we were not familiar of, without any fuss with the female voice giving clear instructions. While the navigation software itself is quite good, navigating the device takes a while getting used to. Our biggest gripes of the device was the sluggishness while searching, the need to scroll up and down to reach out for all options and even the disappointing performance of the TMC unit. At the end, we thought that it is the latter issue that will stop you from buying this over a TomTom, as we have found its Traffic service provided over mobile phone and Bluetooth to a much more effective and elegant solution.

Cost wise, the Acer P660 is well positioned, coming in at the same price as the TomTom 510 with TMC, with the added advantage of offering maps for all of Europe on CD, compared to just the UK and Ireland with the 510. When it comes to the unit design and the look and feel of the software, it is a huge leap forward over Acer’s previous units; but we have to say that there is still plenty of room for improvement in terms of the interface design. If you are not a big fan of TMC and looking for something other than TomTom, then Acer P660 is very much considerable.

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Acer P660 GPS System – Technical Specification Table

Manufacturer	Acer
Model Name	Acer P660 Satellite Navigation system
GPS Application	Car
Colour	Black
Dimensions (W x H x D)	116 X 81 X 25 mm
Weight	195 grams
Display	LCD widescreen
Display screen size	4 inch
Navigation views	2D and 3D
Memory type	Total capacity: 64MB 2GB flash memory model also available
Expansion type	SDRAM
MP3 Player	Yes
Maps included	Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Vatican City. The map coverage also includes the connecting roads of Albania, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Moldavia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine and the Russian Federation
Voice	Navigation instructions
Connectivity	Mini USB 1.1 client (2.0 optional) SD/MMC slot (Supports up to 2 GB)
Audio	1W built-in speaker 3.5 mm stereo earphone jack
Navigation	Vehicle and pedestrian navigation
GPS Processor	Samsung S3C2440A 400 MHz application processor
GPS Chipset	SiRF Star III AL chipset and firmware solution
Operating System	Microsoft Windows CE 5.0
Hardware command Interface	Volume control hot keys Main Menu/ Navigation hot key
Address Book capacity	Maximum capacity of 300 contact entries
Bluetooth	Bluetooth Version 2.0 HS (Headset) / HF (Hands-free) Send location
Included GPS Software	CoPilot 6
Included accessories	TMC: Real-time traffic and weather information, received through FM channel and displayed on device. Entertainment: Pre-loaded software for accessing digital music (MP3) and imagefiles (Photo)
Power	Power status LED indicator
Power saving options	Auto-off function for touch screen backlight
Battery type	High-density rechargeable 1200 mAh Lithium Ion battery
Battery charge time	3.5 hours charging time from empty to full capacity
Recharge options	Wall charger Car charger USB cable
Package contents	Car mount Car holder Car charger Wall charger (Manufacture option) USB cable
Accessories	External GPS antenna External TMC module with antenna
Guarantee	One year