Pharos Drive GPS 250 review

Once you've entered your trip information, you can get directions by quickest or shortest route; with or without highways, toll roads, and so forth. There is also a pedestrian mode. Maps are presented in 2D or 3D view with a Night Mode option that automatically changes the map colors for better visibility at night. There are icons for zooming in and out of maps, and the bottom of the screen will show such information as the current street name, remaining time and distance, and speed. A pop-up box will also appear onscreen to show you the direction of your next turn.

In addition to turn-by-turn directions, the Pharos Drive GPS 250 offers text-to-speech voice-guided directions, which means you'll hear actual street names instead of more generic directions. We're happy to see that more entry-level systems are including this technology, since it's a useful and handy safety feature.

Performance
We tested the Pharos Drive GPS 250 in San Francisco, and from a cold start under clear skies, it took the unit 5 to 6 minutes to get a fix on our location, while subsequent starts took less time. Once locked on, the system did a good job of tracking our location with accuracy. However, the receiver did lose its lock on a couple of occasions, including once when we were in a place with a clear view of the sky, which was a bit disconcerting. The good news is the Drive GPS 250 was able to reacquire the satellites almost immediately.

In addition to using it to track our location about town, we also entered our standard trip from the Maridio (Marina/Presidio district) to CNET's downtown headquarters. Compared with other systems we've tested, the Drive GPS 250 was a bit sluggish in performance. There was a slight lag from the time we pressed an icon or entered information to the time the system actually registered the command. It also took a while to come back with a calculated route. We're just talking about a matter of about 15 to 20 seconds, which isn't that long, but again, it seemed slow when pitted against other in-car GPS.

We looked over the list of turn-by-turn directions and found them to be accurate. On the road, we missed several turns to test the route recalculation rate, which was fairly swift--fast enough to instruct us before our next maneuver. The volume of voice directions was ample, but we found the text-to-speech pronunciations to be robotic and choppy. The Pharos Drive GPS 250's 1,200mAh lithium polymer battery is rated for 5 to 7 hours of continuous use.