TeleNav Shotgun review

When the Shotgun first launched, one thing we knocked it for was the lack of business reviews and the capability to search for movie titles by show time. While we still don't have the latter, TeleNav added business reviews with its latest software update. You can now check out ratings and user reviews for a variety of POI, including restaurants, hotels, stores, and more. You can also add your own ratings and opinions right from the GPS. The feature is particularly useful if you're in unfamiliar territory and need help finding a place to eat or stay. Even if you're not, it's good for discovering new spots in your area.

In addition to the business reviews, TeleNav added a Mileage Capture tool that was designed with business users in mind so that they can track their miles and record them for any clients or jobs. The tool lets you capture your mileage on a specific route or from any user-specified start and end point. Once you return to your office or home, you can then connect the Shotgun to your PC via USB cable to view and download reports as Microsoft Word or PDF files.

Another advantage of the connected service is that you can enter addresses on TeleNav's Web site and then send them wirelessly to your Shotgun. We tried this functionality, and it worked flawlessly. It's real convenient when you have time to plan a trip ahead of time, and don't have to sit there punching in letters and numbers on the device itself. You'll also receive over-the-air software updates, so you don't have to hook up your device to your computer to download the latest software. When an update is available, a pop-up window will appear onscreen and then it will guide you through the download.

The Shotgun comes with maps of the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico and 11 million points of interest, which are preloaded on the aforementioned SIM card. You can plan a route in a number of ways, including by specific address, recent places, favorites, or POI. The GPS supports multidestination planning, so you can have more than one stop along your journey. In the Preferences menu, you'll find various route types: fastest route, shortest route, traffic optimized route, prefer highways, prefer streets, and pedestrian mode.

Once you've entered a start and end point, you can check a list of turn-by-turn directions (along with total distance and estimated time of arrival), view a map summary, or check out traffic along your route. Once on the road, you can view maps in 2D or 3D mode, and you'll see the name of your current street, distance to, and direction of your next turn as well as the street name, and other pertinent information. You are able to zoom in/out and pan through maps, but we noticed it takes some time for the Shotgun to redraw maps, which got to be frustrating.

In addition to the visual aids, you have voice-guided turn-by-turn directions and text-to-speech functionality, so you'll hear the name of the specific streets. Other navigation tools on the TeleNav Shotgun include automatic route recalculation, a Spot Marker feature that lets you mark points along your route in case you want to use it to find your way back or save it as a POI, and a compass.

Performance
We tested the TeleNav Shotgun in San Francisco, and from a cold start, it took the unit about 5 minutes to get a fix on our location, while subsequent starts weren't much faster. Satellite acquisition was never instantaneous. It usually took at least a couple of minutes for the Shotgun to find our position, even if we had just turned off the device for just a second. Also, we were often met with the message "GPS signal is weak" even when we had a clear view of the sky. It got to be quite frustrating, especially since we were just sitting in our car waiting for the Shotgun to kick into gear. Once locked on, the GPS did a decent job of tracking our location as we drove around the city and managed to keep its fix even as we drove through the Financial District where the sky is often blocked by tall buildings.

We plotted a couple of routes with the Shotgun. The first trip was from the Marina District to San Francisco International Airport, and the PND was pretty quick to return with instructions, using the fastest route preference. We checked the list of traffic alerts before heading out, and we liked that the traffic summary also gave the average driving speeds on major highways. Once on the road, the Shotgun was able to get us to our destination with no problem, but the voice prompts sounded a bit muffled and not as clear as some of the other GPS we've tested.

For our second outing, we entered our standard test route, which starts at the Marina District and ends up at CNET's downtown headquarters, and based on the route summary of turn-by-turn directions, we found the directions to be accurate. Along the way, we missed a couple of turns to test the route recalculation rate and encountered some problems. The Shotgun was slow to realize that we were no longer on the course, so it would already be giving us our next instruction before realizing that we were no longer on the original route. As a result, getting back on course was a bit difficult. Admittedly, San Francisco has short city blocks and fortunately, we knew where we were going, but obviously, this isn't the type of performance you want from your PND, especially if you don't know the area.

We found that the TeleNav Connected Service search function wasn't quite up to par. We entered numerous search terms, and while it was fine for generic items like coffee or shoes, it had a hard time with more specific searches. For example, we looked for iPods and got a weird selection of music stores. Meanwhile, there was an Apple store right down the street from our current location. We hope that this can be rectified with software updates and we look forward to the new functionality that's planned for the Shotgun. The TeleNav Shotgun has a rated battery life of 2.5 hours, which is pretty short, but we're happy the company includes a wall charger for home use and a car charger.