You can view maps in 2D or 3D mode, and with day or night colors. The map screen shows you plenty of data, such as the name of the street you're on, distance to next turn, estimated time of arrival, remaining distance, a compass, signal strength, and more. In addition, the Asus R700t offers 3D building renderings, which is pretty cool to see as it runs you through the route.
The R700t has integrated Bluetooth 2.0, so you can pair with a compatible Bluetooth-enabled cell phone and use it as a hands-free speaker system. Once paired with your handset, you can make calls using the system's onscreen dialpad or if there's a number associated with a point of interest you can dial out directly. Unfortunately, however, you can't transfer your phone's contact list or call history.
Finally, the Asus R700t has multimedia capabilities, including a video and music player and an image viewer. The system supports MP3 and WMA music files and WMV videos. The player itself is fairly basic with just the standard functions--play, forward/rewind, shuffle, and repeat. You can create playlists on the device, and there is a full-screen mode for videos. The image viewer can show JPEG and BMP files. The R700t has 1GB Flash ROM and 64MB RAM. For multimedia files, we recommend using a microSD card; the R700t can accept up to 4GB cards.
Performance
As far as general performance, the Asus R700t could be sluggish at times, despite having a 400MHz processor. It takes several minutes for the Navigation application to start up, so don't freak out if you don't see anything happening for a while. Also, there were a couple of times where we had to reset the device after the system froze on us. It only happened twice but still, a little cause for worry.
For our road tests, we took to the streets of San Francisco and from a cold start, it took about three minutes to get a fix on our location under cloudy skies. Subsequent starts were a bit mixed; sometimes satellite acquisition would be instantaneous while at other times, it would take a couple of minutes. Once locked on, the R700t did a good job of tracking our location, and as we noted earlier, it was pretty cool and useful to see the 3D building renderings, as it gives you a more accurate idea of your position with points of reference. We found the POI database to be fairly up to date, though we noticed some missing listings.
We also entered our standard trip from the Marina District to CNET's downtown headquarters. The R700t quickly returned with directions based on the fastest route. The list of turn-by-turn directions were accurate so we headed off on our journey. The voice-guided directions were loud and clear, but again, we missed having the text-to-speech functionality. We also missed several turns to test the route recalculation rate, which was quick but we didn't always necessarily agree with the new route, as some suggestions seemed roundabout to us.
We were also able to successfully pair the R700t with the
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