Averatec Voya 350

When you hear the name Averatec, you probably think laptops and not GPS devices. However, the company is expanding its consumer electronics portfolio with its first personal navigation system, the Averatec Voya 350. It's a basic system with text- and voice-guided driving directions, a points-of-interest database, and automatic route recalculation. But we're not knocking it for its simple feature set, especially when you consider its reasonable price tag of $379.99. That said, the Voya isn't as sophisticated as some of the systems from more established GPS companies. It has some design quirks, and the interface could be simpler, for example, so for our money, we'd rather go with the TomTom One or the Garmin StreetPilot i series. Still, it gets the job done, and it isn't a bad system for minimalists or GPS newbies.

Overall, the Averatec Voya 350 is a compact (4.5 by 2.9 by 0.7 inches; 6 ounces) device, although a helical antenna adds an extra 0.75 inches of unwanted bulk and is a bit of an eyesore. Still, it's a travel-friendly device that you can easily transport from car to car and even use on foot. It'd be good for, say, navigating the streets of large cities such as New York or Chicago.

The front of the unit is dominated by a 3.5-inch TFT touch screen that displays 16.7 million colors at a 320x240-pixel resolution. It's readable in sunlight, but we had some initial problems with the touch screen. There were several occasions where we had to tap a menu icon several times before the screen registered our command, but we recalibrated the screen under the Setup menu, and that did the trick. Unlike other GPS devices we've seen with touch screens, the Voya 350 also comes with a stylus (located on top of the device) so that you can use it for more precise input--a good thing, since the onscreen keyboard can be a bit cramped.

To the right of the screen, you will find the speaker, power on/off, a Main Menu button, Zoom In and Out keys, and a five-way navigation toggle. There are a couple of things to note about the latter. First, it isn't a directional keypad as one might expect. Instead, pressing up toggles between North Up and Heading Up; pressing down switches between 2D and 3D map view; and the left and right keys cycle through the map views, GPS setting, trip info, and more. In addition, pressing the control in the middle brings up the Set Destination screen. Admittedly, these take a little getting used to, but we eventually warmed up to them and found some of the information to be quite useful. For example, the Current Location page will tell you which side of the street odd-numbered and even-numbered addresses are on. The control itself is a bit wobbly and doesn't always work properly. After a while, we found it best to just nudge the outer edges, rather than pressing the button directly.

The Voya 350's wobbly navigation toggle launches different map views and menu functions.

On the left spine, there is a reset hole, a Hold button, a jack for an optional external antenna (for enhanced reception), and a port for the power adapter. The right side has an SD card expansion slot and a headphone jack, while there's a connector on the bottom for the included car charger. Aside from the car charger, Averatec packages the Voya 350 with an SD card preloaded with maps of North America, an AC adapter, and a vehicle mount (windshield and dash). The one thing we wish the company had also included was a carrying case (à la the Mio C710), since the device could easily travel with you on foot.