The Navigon PNA 150 is a marriage between known hardware and Navigons own mobile navigator 5 software, the PNA hardware is the same used in the Medion PNA150 which is a PXA255 XScale processor running at 300 MHz and comes with 64Mb RAM.

The Device measures 125 mm x 78 – 98 mm x 20 mm and fixes neatly to the windscreen using a sucker system and docking clip, while the gooseneck style mount feels a bit flimsy to hold the 165 gram Navigon PNA the device itself feels well built and it a nice simple design.

Maps are stored on MMC cards which can be removed and exchanged or even upgraded in size, the system runs on a windows CE platform although this is entirely hidden from the user who just sees the device boot straight into the Navigon 5.0 software.

Powering up gives you the first glimpse of this latest Navigon software version and first thoughts tend to be that it is very cluttered and perhaps overly technical the touch screen has a menu system along its right-hand edge which has icons for commonly requested actions and access to the settings.

Unbelievably this is the simplified version compared to the Navigon 4 software which we have never reviewed on Lordpercy.com but we have seen in action, the starting point for our tests is always to input that first address, Navigon has the full range of options including postcode search.

We quickly located our destination and could have a good look around the area with the 3D map and the PNA's ability to give multiple types of view using the pen stylus and 320 x 240 pixel touch screen, normally we wouldn't bother with this but we did note that the TTF (time to fix) was notably longer than other units we've tested so we had a bit more time in the car park to kill.

Once we finally had satellite lock it was off into the night with the pleasantly backlight Navigon PNA screen glowing from atop our dashboard, the female voice giving short yet calm spoken instructions to "turn left" in a slightly Germanic manner, volume is just about loud enough to be acceptable in a noisy car. The route chosen was a sound one and probably the fastest given a combination of motorways and A roads the on screen view is easy to use despite the cluttered extras which form a series of semi transparent boxes along the bottom of the screen.

Time to upset the Navigon PNA with a few wrong turns and deliberate stupid driving, in truth it coped very well, we ignore the M25 when it wanted us to join and instead it routed us along an A road to the next junction, the same seamless re routing was applied to local roads without that fateful "turn around when possible" of some systems.

Similar to the TomTom system you can set detours or road avoidance mid route, its not quite as user friendly as the TomTom go but it is useable and easy enough to get off the M25 when its blocked.

The Maps seem to be the latest Q4 Navteq ones that we saw only last week in the new TomTom version 5 release, these now include the M6 toll road and other major omissions, the package we tested comes with UK and Ireland maps pre loaded on a 256mb MMC card and the CD supplied has the rest of Europe's maps on it which can be loaded using the ClerverMap function.

This Clever Map system allows the unit to ship with all of Europe on DVD but only certain sections are unlocked and available by payment of an additional fee you can unlock the new sections for use on wider travels and push these map segments to your device where they dovetail with the UK map.

Unlike many Windows based navigation systems all the other feature like word and excel are hidden deep and not accessible to the user and in our opinion this is a good thing, the processor spends all its time rendering maps and powering the Navigon engine.

Overall this is a very competent package and nicely styled too, priced at around the £380 mark.

Published - 17/04/2005

More GPS Reviews-

[ Up ] [ Tom Tom Go Review ] [ Mitac Mio 168 GPS ] [ Trafficmaster YQ2 ] [ Wayfinder Mobile Navigator ] [ Navman PIN GPS ] [ Navman iCN630 ] [ Navigon PNA ] [ Globalsat GV-101 ] [ TrafficMaster SmartNav System ] [ Kane Car Pilot Plus ] [ Garmin 2610 Review ] [ Navman 4400 Bluetooth GPS receiver ] [ Garmin ique 3600 PDA ]