many people seem to be a bit sniffy about buying Medion kit, mostly due to the fact that Medion use supermarket chain Aldi as one of its key outlets. But as GPS systems become a commodity why shouldn't a cost effective brand be able to produce a good workable navigation system at the right price. Our last experience of Medion was with a PDA based version and while it didn't quite have the panache of the Garmin's and Navman's of this world it was more than adequate and at a very attractive price.

So the arrival of our GoPal 350 was an interesting event as there were wagers on it being a poor copy of a TomTom Go, however minutes after opening the box it was clear that the construction and design of the unit was far better than we had expected. Inside beats a Samsung 266Mhz processor which we hoped would be up to the job, paired with a 256mb MMC card pre loaded with the Navteq UK and Ireland maps.

The GoPal 350 ships with a basic suction mount which was easy enough to clamp to our cars windscreen and the unit seemed to fit fairly snugly without any annoying rattles, power is via the unusual 12 volt cord and cigarette lighter plug. Fire up the Medion GoPal and it's obvious that this is a Windows CE based device (4.2) which tends to be a bit of a worry, but we press on to be confronted with the Medion Navigator software which to all intents and purposes is Navigons Navigator 5.

The inbuilt GPS receiver sits in the rear of the unit and when clamped to our windscreen got its first lock on enough satellites in around 3 minutes, the key ongoing TTF (time to fix) was around 30 - 50 seconds when starting the unit after it had been powered down for 8 hours. This is acceptable if not the fastest we've seen and not a patch on the newer SiRF Star III chipsets, but you won't be hanging around in car parks for too long.

Route input is via address or postcode as with the Navigon software, the interface is easy enough to use for data entry and the route calculation times seem on a par with other systems. As you start to navigate through the GoPal's menus the changes do seem a little sluggish and sometimes it can take the device a while to carry out your commands. Again you can live with this but it did make us worry for the on road performance.

Time to set off and the bright screen of the Medion sparked into life scrolling as we moved and then our first spoken instruction a simple turn right was delivered with sufficient volume. As we gathered speed the voice instructions became a little more difficult to hear which was surprising given the front facing speakers that do their best to make the device ugly. The on screen instructions suffer the same fate at the main Navigon product in that they are cluttered and try to show too much information. Sure we want, time to destination a compass, time elapsed, next turn etc but other systems manage to make it so much more readable especially when you only have a moment to glance at the screen.

That said the GoPal 350 delivered us by a sensible route to our first engagement of the day at a PR company, who incidentally thought the Medion was a TomTom unit when glancing through the cars window. On the return we decided to take a few wrong turns, on the whole the unit coped well without trying to make us U turn in a dangerous place but we did see a few slow ups of the system while it was trying to recalculate. Perhaps this is the Windows CE operating system struggling under the load of continuing navigation while re-plotting? Its worth noting other devices running this OEM Navigon software have 400Mhz processors.

Again we had a fairly uneventful journey and although the Medion is a little rough around the edges its perfectly functional for the job at hand. Then we look to see what else there is to offer and find what we hoped would be the killer blow. Medion have equipped the GoPal 350 with TMC (traffic messaging channel) this sends real-time (well sort of) data alongside an FM radio channel (in the UK its classic FM) this data can then be displayed showing hold ups. The data itself is the same data used for RDS radio broadcasts and is as reliable as the human that maintains it, trafficmaster it is not. However with Medion its free, with TomTom its £40 a year! the same data and also TomTom use your phones data connection to get it costing you further still.

So a big victory for Medion for now, TomTom have recently announced their new models will have an optional unit which will plug into access the free broadcasts, but its still a cost option!  If you happen to be travelling outside the UK you can purchase maps for other regions and either replace the UK one on the MMC card or even buy a larger card, so you should be ok for European travel if needs be. There is also support for POI's (points of interest).

So we have a mixed result, a device that while not the prettiest to look at does get the job done. It doesn't have the best mapping software yet its useable and will get you from A to B without too much fuss and can cope with wrong turns. If it had been made 2 years ago we'd have been raving about it but now its most notable feature is the free TMC data, so it all comes down to price.

On sale at just under £300 it's not cheap, that was the price for a TomTom Go 300 6 months ago, but now you can get the new TomTom One for under £230 and that leaves the Medions key selling point looking a little wanting. So unless the Medion GoPal gets under the £200 mark it really can't warrant our recommendation.

Published - 21/04/2006

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