GPS Sat Nav Systems

The moment you think of a SatNav purchase, a few of the famous brands that instantly come to mind are Magellan, Garmin, Mio or even TomTom. But now the motherboard stalwart seems to dominate the idea by unveiling their very own Satellite Navigation gagets. In the following review, we will see about the stylish and yet affordable Asus R300, which is targeted at teen drivers. We say this because, despite being a solid navigator, this seems to be known well as a multimedia gadget as against a GPS. The Asus R300 packs a whole load of features placing it in part with the rest of its expensive competitors. Then again, there are no technology barriers broken by the R300 that is generally expected of a budget device.

Design:

Slimmed down:
The last two or three years can be named as the slim down era with each manufacturer claiming that they could produce something the thinnest. The revolution was kick started by Motorola V3, which was closely followed by Nokia and then came the manufacturers of PDAs, laptops, external drives and now, our own GPS devices. The Asus R300 too is one of those thinnest GPS devices in the market with the dimensions being (H x W x D) 3.2 x 4.0 x 0.5 inches. The R300 also sports a 3.5 inches TFT LCD 65k colour display boasting a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The auto dimming feature of the device is appreciable. Try using it in a vehicle connected to a DC power adapter and you will be impressed by way itself On and Off along with the car’s engine.

There is also a USB slot that takes care of the PC interface along with the inclusion of a slot for external memory cards with a 3.5-mm jack to get your headphones connected. The battery is swappable and has 1300mAh of power.

Installation:
The Asus R300 Sat Nav System is accompanied by a suction cup mount, which articulates fairly well giving the best view during the drive. The suction cup looks to be pretty robust regardless of bumpy roads or roads filled with pot holes. With most of the GPS devices, you can simply take it out of the box, plug it in and you are probably ready to drive. Unfortunately, setting up of the Asus R300 is not that simple and looks to be lengthy. Well, you begin with installing the battery for starters by moving the tiny slide switch to “On” position that is at the bottom of the unit. (Please note, this is totally a separate entity from the original Power Button playing the role of a “hold switch” that inserts the microSD). Sadly, none of these steps were documented in the printed quick-start guide. After figuring out the starting sequence by ourselves, we had the device up and running in just a few moments.

User Interface:

Main Menu:
When the R300 is first booted, you will arrive at the main menu which will give you access to video players, photo viewer, music player, Bluetooth Phone interface, device settings and Navigation.

You will be able to change the basic features with the help of the basic settings menu and in this menu, you will be able to adjust the language settings, backlight, date and time, Bluetooth settings, volume, to align screen and view system information.

You only need to enter letters or numbers in Asus R300 Satellite Navigator when you cannot avoid it. The feather touch full-screen keyboard of the R300 requires just fingertip typing and also gives you the option of swapping to various keyboard layouts, namely QWERTY, ABC or numerical. Though there is a choice of keyboard layouts offered, but we found that it was bit of a challenge to tap over the correct letters irrespective of the configuration; a stylus would have helped. Of course, that might be partly because of the small display. While the R300 supports auto zoom, it doesn’t support auto volume. So despite the volume being a 100%, we feel that the volume could have been louder and this issue also arises with using the Bluetooth phone interface.

Overall, the Asus R300 is kind of easy to use. Though the menu system is a bit more complex than we have seen on the other devices, we were able to adapt quite quickly.

Maps:
The Asus R300 handheld sat nav includes the maps of France and all the major roads across Europe. This sat nav supports 2D and 3D viewing of maps and also change the way a map looks. For instance you could rotate, tilt or scale it, whatever suits you best while you create, plan or following a route. Likewise you can also customise those buttons or icons that you choose to keep visible. For instance, if you are not a great fan of cluttering and prefer keeping things simple and neat, then you can clear unwanted icons like the battery status icon.

Features:

When it comes to features, most manufacturers cut them down in their budget models. Fortunately, Asus is not one of them; it has equipped the R300 with abundant features. Being built around a Samsung 400 Mhz processor and the industry standard SiRF III receiver, the Asus R300 sat nav features 128MB of flash ROM and 64MB of SDRAM. A 1.3 million POI data base and Tele Atlas maps is also offered on a 2GB Micro SD Card. It uses Windows CE 5.0 Operating system and its internal antenna integrated with a high sensitivity SirfStar III GPS receiver.

Navigation:
The Asus R300 uses its navigation software derived from the Nav N Go’s iGO 8 software, with its previous version used on various devices like the Novogo’s S700, Mio’s DigiWalker C520/220 and V7 NAV740. The R300 is one of the early birds to use the iGO 8 version of the software. This latest version adds in 3D visualisation, in which you will be able to actually see buildings and landmarks along your route. It has not yet been implemented in the regular suburbs, but we were able to see various landmarks in 3D.

Asus R300 starts by displaying the Navigation menu in Simple mode. The fastest way that you can start navigating is by tapping over the find address tab. There are a number of ways by which you can select your destination, and they include:

• Using the selected location on the map.
• Enter a full address or part of an address, for example a street name without a house number or the names of two intersecting streets.
• Enter an address with postal code, this avoids the need to select a settlement and makes the search for street names faster too.
• Using coordinates or a saved location like a POI or favourite
• Using previously set waypoints or destination history

We had mentioned that the navigation starts in Simple Mode; there is an Advanced mode too. In simple mode, you have easy access to the most important navigation functions and the basic settings only. Whereas, in the Advanced mode, you have access to the full functionality of Asus R300.

You can check the details of locations like address, coordinates, nearby POIs, by tapping the location on the screen. The Cursor, a red dot appears on the screen in shiny red circles. The location’s address flashes at the base of the map. The current street and info on house number gets displayed during navigation Tap on the cursor button to open the Cursor Menu and tap over the Info button to see the address, coordinates and the list of nearby POIs.

Route calculation and Recalculation:

Asus R300 Handheld Personal Navigator calculates the route based on your preferences that include route calculation method and vehicle and route types. The device automatically recalculates the route if you deviate from the proposed set of steps.

Itinerary and Track Logs:

Itinerary has the list of nearest route events and driving instructions. When you are on a map, the itinerary gets displayed in two ways, both from the Cockpit Screen (by tapping the section between the travel data and trun preview) and Advanced Mode (by tapping the menu/ itinerary tab, you get the itinerary list. The R300 can also log the track that you drive. The track log is a recording of how your GPS position changed and it is independent of the route Asus GO calculated.

Option range:
The Asus R300 GPS System offers six vehicle profiles including car, pedestrian, bicycle and others. It also supports eight road types and four routing types including fast, short, easy and economical. The R300’s Satellite Navigator detects automatically the mode of travel and also displays info accordingly. You are also allowed to save your routes, including destinations and route preferences. This is actually one of the most useful features that are not seen in most of the other GPS devices.

Multimedia in Asus R300:
The 2GB microSD card that comes with a SD adaptor has about 367MB free for your multimedia files. It is notable that the R300 GPS also accepts cards of up to 4GB. As we copied an assortment of videos, MP3 and Image files, on to the microSD card, we found that, like most of the media players found in GPS devices, this one too is quite basic. The device plays the MP3 files without any issues, but we were really surprised when the R300’s photo viewer quickly resized the 3.0+ MB images and presented them in slideshow. When we tried playing couple of MP4’s from our iPod, few AVI files from our digicam and couple of WMV files; however, only the WMV files managed to play successfully.

Points Of Interest:
As with most of the current GPS devices, it has many Points of Interest pre-set in the system. Thus users can now easily find the nearest gas station, airport or hotel. With the POI icons fairly large, recognising them wouldn’t pose a problem. Likewise as the icons are semitransparent streets and intersections do not get hidden behind.

It provides accurate route guidance and timely voice instructions. It provides users with a facility to store past locations and favourites. It was disappointing to see that the POI database of Asus R300 does not include phone numbers, especially, since with the Bluetooth feature you will be able to dial them directly from the device.

Connectivity:
The settings menu supports establishing a Bluetooth connection to your mobile for you to enjoy hands-free calls and also broadcasts audio to the car stereo via the FM transmitter, along with a set of other general device parameters. Though the R300 was able to easily connect to our mobile phones, it was not able to read the contact list or even the call list. When we dialled a few test calls from the large on screen keypad, the receivers said that we sounded somewhat muffled and was difficult to understand what we said. When we made use of the handset’s speaker phone, the audio quality on both the ends sounded much better.

FM Transmitter:
Unfortunately, the signal from FM transmitter of the R300 wasn’t really helpful or should we say strong enough in suppressing the static in the background, thereby resulting in audio distortion. The magnitude of disappointment would be lesser if you don’t expect the world out of both the Bluetooth interface and the FM transmitter in the R300.

Smart Zoom:

Smart Zoom feature of R300 is significantly better than the conventional automatic zoom. For eg., with an approaching a turn, the view angle gets raised and zoomed allowing you to recognise and ease your manoeuvre for the approaching junc­tion. If the next turn is at a distance, it will zoom out and lower the view angle to be flat so you can see the road in front of you. While driving without an active route in the device: Auto Zoom will zoom in if you drive slowly and zoom out to the limit set here when you drive at high speed.

Day and Night Colour Schemes:
The R300 smartly utilizes various skins and scheme of colours differentiating day and night with daylight colours akin to paper road maps and night schemes using darker colours for huge objects thus keeping the screen’s average brightness at bay. Likewise the Asus R300 smartly switches automatically to daytime or nigh mode depending on the GPS position and current date couple of minutes prior to sunrise when the sky begins to turn bright and again a couple of minutes prior to sunset when it starts turning dark.

Languages and Voice:
The Asus R300 has an extensive choice of 34 languages, along with several voice choices for each of them. Unfortunately the device does not support text to speech conversion, and so, the street names are not pronounced.

Package:

The package contents of Asus R300 includes a car holder, charger, a support CD containing the full manual and map, a quick start guide, a micro SD card, USB cable and a warranty card.

Warranty:

Asus offers its R300 GPS device one year limited warranty for parts and labour.

Verdict:

With manufacturers of budget GPS arena always left with the ultimate choice to choose the kind of features to be retained in their products while still battling to keep the price of the device down, Asus has successfully managed to load the R300 with goodies you would normally get to see only in expensive models. This device can be used as a GPS system as well as an entertainment hub. Some of the irresistible features of the R300 include Multi segment routing, multiple vehicle and road profiles, excellent language support and route saving feature. The text to speech feature was really missed. Still, directions were given at appropriate intervals, and the R300 correctly guided to the respective places. The FM transmitter and the Bluetooth phone interface could have been dropped, as neither of them worked that well. Yet the Asus R300 sure does offer a lot for the kind of price tag it carries. Overall, this is just the right choice, if you are in the market for a stylish GPS device that packs the features, but does not cost you a fortune.

Check Acer Sat Nav Reviews, Best selling Garmin GPS Systems in this website.

Asus R300 Portable Sat Nav System – Technical Specification Details

Manufacturer	Asus
Model Name	Asus R300 Satellite Navigation system
GPS Application	Car, Pedestrian, bike and bicycle
Colours Available	Silver, White, Pink and Brown
Dimensions (H x W x D)	3.2 x 4.0 x 0.5 inches
Weight	140 grams
Display	TFT Touch-screen
Resolution	65K Color, 320 x 240 Pixels (QVGA)
Display screen size	3.5 inch
Navigation views	2D and 3D
Expansion type	Micro SD Card Slot (up to 4GB)
MP3 Player	Play/suspend/forward/backward/next/previous, Play Lister
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	USB 1.1, Bluetooth 2.0 (with Handsfree function)
Audio	Built-in speaker  3.5 mm stereo earphone jack
Navigation	Vehicle and pedestrian navigation
GPS Processor	Samsung 400 MHz application processor
GPS Chipset	SiRF STAR III GPS chipset with internal antenna
Operating System	Microsoft® Windows® CE .Net 5.0 Core version
Address Book	Yes
Bluetooth	Bluetooth Version 2.0 HS (Headset) / HF (Hands-free)
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 image files (Photo)
Power	Power status LED indicator
Features	Preinstalled POIs, Speed limit warning, Speed Camera warnings, 2D / 3D map perspective, Hands-free calling via Bluetooth
Additional Features	Light sensor Optional TMC module (depends on TMC service availability) FMT availability depends on validity in different countries
Battery type	1300 mAh, rechargeable Li-ion battery (Swappable)
Package contents	Car mount Car holder Car charger Wall charger (Manufacture option) USB cable
Warranty	One year