Navman N40i (GPS receiver)

I bought this in Oct 2006 and it actually helped me drive in the Boston downtown, Columbus OH, Washington State, Oregon and Iowa.

The processor is really fast as well as it can calculate real fast back on track (like 4/5sec only) if you miss a turn. It also acquires the GPS signal pretty fast.

I loved its NavPix feature (that was one of the reasons I bought this apart from the processor). If you don't know a place you can just take a picture of that spot and the GPS will take you back anytime to the same spot (with the photo it stores the coordinates). You can also download pics from
http://www.navman.com/navpix/templates/default____40200.aspx

It has good POIs data base. So far I found out that for very few of the POIs, the addresses are wrong (also 1 exit # even though it tells the right place to exit). Another drawback is that it has sub-classification of the restaurants (like Italian, French, ...).

Touch screen is excellent with many functionalities available that way (e.g. one can set a starting point even though you don't have a GPS signal and then look at the direction for you destination). One can also buy a IR remote for this device.

One problem with the unit that I have is with restarting from standby mode. Sometimes it fails and you have to shut the unit down. But this is not a stopper for me.

For EU, one can buy the live traffic update module (which is only 1 time payment of around $40/50). I would like that feature for US also along with the safety camera data base for US (which is again available for EU).

If you want to get somewhere, it will show you how to get there. That works well.

Other functions, particularly the POIs, are quite poor and seem like a gimmick. You should be able to totally re-organise POIs your own way.

You can set it to display POIs as you drive along (so, for example, you can see where parks or train stations are) but the icons are all blue and look the same, so it's a useless *******.

The camera is poor, not because it's a low megapixel count, but because it blows even the slighest highlight. Set it to -1 on the brightness setting helps. But because it creates jpegs with the GPS co-ords in the EXIF data, I have a record of where I've been and a picture for reference, and that's all I wanted.


The touchscreen works well. Entering addresses is easy enough, but a proper qwerty keyboard option would be nice (it uses alphabetical order keys).

Overal, I'm quite happy, though I think, like a lot of gadgets, there is a lot of potential here let down by dodgy software. The basic functions work, though, so it gets and 8.