10 sub-£300 GPS systems get taken on a road test

One of the most popular options for satellite navigation is the all-in-one solution that you can just plug in and stick on your car’s dashboard, without worrying about linking to the computer or performing a tricky installation.

Devices like these have been around for a while, but were quite expensive; the development of pocket computers has helped commoditise the hardware, while companies like Tom Tom, with its Go range, provided attractive and simple solutions that outshone some of the old-fashioned offerings from traditional GPS manufacturers.

But just how good are these newer devices? We’ve looked at 10 models, ranging in price from around £180 to £300 – our brief was that they cost less than £300, include at least UK street-level navigation and come ready to use, complete with car mounting kits.

There are remarkable similarities between some of them, while others stand out in various ways.

As well as test driving all the units, we’ll explain what you should look for from a GPS device and provide lots of practical hints and tips to help you make the most of the system.

We’ll also help you decide which of the products really is the best one for the kind of driving that you do.

In-car GPS navigation may be one of the top gadgets of the moment, but why would you need it and what exactly can it do for you?

GPS relies on a constellation of satellites operated by the US, constantly transmitting data. A GPS receiver picks up the signals from these and, with the aid of some clever mathematics, is able to work out its own position on the planet.

Add a little intelligence, and it can work out which direction it’s moving in and how fast as, contrary to popular myth, GPS doesn’t track you. It simply allows a receiver to know where it is and the receiver can do what it wants with the information.

If you want to know where someone is, you need a GPS system that combines a receiver either with software that records a log of all the locations, or hardware – such as a mobile phone – that can send information about the position to someone else.

So, while most navigation systems will keep a ‘track’ in their memory, recording where you’ve been, using GPS doesn’t mean the satellites are spying on you; unless you give someone access to that track, you’re just as anonymous as you were.

Having dispensed with that concern, just what can you expect from a GPS unit and what should you consider when you’re choosing one?

Navigation
The basic task for all GPS receivers is helping you get from A to B, and the first hurdle is how you tell it where those two places are.

Much of the time, your journey will start from your current location and the system can work that out for itself.

When it comes to the destination, you need some way of saying exactly where that is. In the UK, we’re fortunate to have a detailed postcode system that can accurately locate any address in the country with ease.

Unfortunately, most GPS units don’t support full postcode entry; some allow you to enter just the first part, providing a list of streets to choose from, while others don’t even do that, requiring you to narrow down the area by region or town, then picking a street.

With a well-designed interface, that can be fairly straightforward; with a poor one, it can be nothing short of a nightmare – and in some cases an interface that looks straightforward may turn out to be a nuisance if the unit’s buttons are unresponsive or the on-screen icons are too fiddly to press.

It’s also worth considering whether or not a system supports waypoints – intermediate destinations that you can add to a list. You may want these if you have to visit several clients in turn, or you want to take a specific route.

You can, of course, achieve much the same by driving to one destination and planning another route from there or by marking some roads as blocked and hoping the GPS routes you round them the way you want to – but it’s a lot more hit and miss.

Test out waypoints before relying on them though – it can be annoying if you pass one only to find that the GPS tells you to double back, because you didn’t get quite close enough for it to realise you’re ready to go on to the next destination.

You should also be aware that some units might call waypoints by different names, such as ‘Favourites’ or ‘Stopovers’.

For an occasional user, some awkwardness may be OK; if you need the GPS to take you to a different client a few times a day, it’ll soon become extremely annoying.

To avoid frustration, you really need a system with a range of methods to enter destinations, good support for waypoints and an interface flexible enough to let you update the route easily if you need to.

Points of interest
Much driving, of course, isn’t necessarily about a straightforward journey to somewhere with an identifiable address.

It’s for just this sort of situation that navigation systems provide Points of Interest (POIs); you can select types of POI and see the nearest ones, making it easy to navigate to the place you want.

One fairly recent addition to the canon of useful POIs, found on many of the units we tested, is information about safety cameras. We have mixed feelings about this, but undoubtedly some people will find it useful to be alerted to the cameras and there are no doubts about the legality of using the information.

While many of the traditional types of POI are fairly static, information needs to be kept up to date, so it’s useful if you’re able to add extra information manually or update existing information.

Not all systems allow that; most will let you mark roads as blocked, in case there’s been a change to a one-way system, for example, and some will let you create POIs on your PC, to transfer to the device.

One thing you won’t get, however, is a complete set of new maps, and you need to resign yourself to replacing them every few years.

If you don’t use the system much, in fact, you may want to consider a GPS system purchased now as your last one and hold off on spending more for updates until the European Galileo network is up and running (see Europe's GPS constellation box).

Beyond borders
While many people simply need to get from one place to another in the UK, for others it’s essential to be able find their way on the continent and additional map information is available for most systems.

It’s also quite common for GPS systems to come with ‘major roads of Europe’ which sounds attractive and may be useful to get you to a few places, but almost certainly won’t be up to finding your holiday chalet in the Swiss Alps.

If you’re serious about finding places, you do need to pay for street-level mapping in the countries you’re going to.

There’s another potential gotcha, though – if you have individual maps on memory cards, you can’t usually plan a route that starts on one card and ends on the other; you’ll have to stop at the border and switch maps, so an all-in-one map really is essential for seamless motoring and that can push up the cost of some of the units.

Avoiding traffic jams
Maps aren’t the only hidden extras that you might find when you start investigating the world of GPS. Several of the systems that we looked at can provide dynamic routing; that means they will be able to update your planned route based on traffic conditions. It’s a neat idea and very useful, but is it worth it?

Some manufacturers obviously think so; in the UK the Trafficmaster system has been available for many years and broadcasts information that can help you identify delays – basic information is available free, while an annual subscription provides more detailed information.

But you don’t necessarily need to pay. An add-on to RDS (Radio Data System), called TMC (Traffic Message Channel), allows a small receiver the size of a pencil eraser to pick up travel information and feed it into the GPS unit via USB, where it can be used to provide dynamic routing, without the need to pay a subscription – and TMC works both in the UK and on the continent.

An alternative solution appears in some products. Most people will have a mobile with them, even if they’re not using it to run navigation software. Using a mobile phone link, traffic information can be downloaded from the web.

It’s another neat solution, but you’re reliant on the server that provides the information, rather than a network of many FM radio stations. Navicore offers a free option, but not all are; Tom Tom’s traffic update service requires a subscription, for instance.

Even free isn’t without cost, though, if you’re motoring abroad, where you could pay heavy roaming charges for the mobile connection necessary to retrieve the data.

If routing around delays is important – rather than merely a way to avoid frustration – we’d recommend a system that can be used with a TMC receiver; it’s a one-off cost and you won’t get a nasty shock on your mobile bill later.

On the road
All the GPS units that we’ve looked at in this test are designed to be used in a car; they’re supplied with a windscreen suction mount, allowing you to position them so you can glance quickly at the display and press the buttons to set up routes or to start or stop navigation.

You’ll also need to provide them with power; though most have internal rechargeable batteries, for longer journeys you don’t want to risk running out of juice at a crucial moment, which could mean a trailing cable to the cigarette lighter.

You can mount the GPS on the dashboard too – but you’ll generally need to ensure that the antenna can ‘see’ the sky in order to pick up the satellite signals.

Normally, that happens within a few minutes, unless you’ve not used the system for a while or have travelled a long distance from the last location where you turned it off; when that happens, a GPS receiver has to do a ‘cold start’ and can take 10 minutes or so to work out where it is – so if you’re in a hurry in the morning, it can save time to switch the receiver on the night before.

Some of the latest windscreens have special reflective coatings to avoid the car heating up too much in hot weather, so watch out as they can disrupt the GPS signals, making them impossible to receive.

The only alternative in that situation is an external antenna, which you can clip on the outside of the car – with more trailing wires across the interior.

Add a TMC receiver that plugs into the GPS rather than one that’s built-in, plus its aerial and you're in danger of creating a dangerous bird’s nest effect in the front of your car.

It’s vital to sort this out properly, tucking cables away wherever you can; you don’t want to be distracted by anything when you’re on the road, so take care positioning the display.

Equally you should be able to see it without having to take your eye off the road. Realistically, while the display is useful, when you’re driving the spoken directions should be telling you all you need to know; a glance at the screen when you’ve stopped at a junction should be enough.

Remember you’ll also need to use the controls on the GPS from time to time – entering destinations, zooming in or changing the volume, for example, so check that you can reach everything you need to from your driving position.

In fact, with most of these units, entering addresses at arm’s length is tedious; you may be able to zoom in and out of a map, but selecting something via an on-screen keyboard like that is not easy.

So either position the GPS where you can use it comfortably, or resign yourself to removing it from the cradle each time you want to set up a new journey or alter your existing one.

And don’t forget – as apparently one in 10 GPS owners claimed to do in a recent survey by Privilege Insurance – that you should set up the route before you drive off; it’s much harder, not to mention extremely reckless and potentially illegal, to program the navigation system when you’re driving.

Making the right choice
So, buying a navigation system isn’t just a case of getting the one that looks the best in the shop; there’s inevitably some compromise and there’s not necessarily one right answer for every driver.

To test the systems, we fitted them in turn in a Citroën saloon and conducted test drives around the London area. As well as ease of use of the controls, we made some assessment of the routing capabilities.

All the systems will get you from one place to another, of course – they all rely on one of two sources of map data, Navteq or Teleatlas, so you’d expect there to be little real difference between them.

But it’s what the software does with the information that makes the difference. We used test routes that included multiple-lane roads, with different destinations for different lanes and made plenty of deliberate mistakes to see how well we were re-routed.

We’ve picked out the systems that we think did the best in our tests, but remember, the right choice for you may not even be one of the products on test here.

But what you’ll quickly realise is that, especially for those who don’t have someone to sit next to them and read a map, satellite navigation really can make a tremendous difference to your journeys.

This article is part of a group test of satellite navigation systems. Others are:
Intro and Editor's choice
Blue Media BM6380GPS
Evesham Nav-Cam 7000
Garmin Street Pilot i3
Magellan Roadmate 300
Medion Go Pal PNA350
Mio 268+
Navman ICN520
Novogo A30
Tom Tom One
Viamichelin X930
Top-of-the-range options
The choice between all-in-ones or PDA add-ons
Europe's GPS constellation

Editor's choice: page 5

Editor's choice
Choosing a sat nav device is very much a personal decision; not everyone needs one for the same reason or drives in the same sort of circumstances.

We’ve explained the things that you should consider when you’re looking for a navigation system, so which of the ones on test meets our criteria?

First, as you can see by looking at the results of our testing with the three Navigon-equipped systems, it’s not just a matter of the software.

The map data makes a difference and the interface can make or break these, especially when it comes to the really important thing – being able to use them in a car safely.

Too many of the systems on test here had quirks or annoyances that might leave you frustrated, glancing at the screen or fiddling with things when you should be paying attention to the road, with lack of audio volume a common thread running through this group test.

We’d also like to see more units include full support for UK postcodes – and the manufacturers should be more honest in that regard. UK postcodes are much more detailed than in other countries and, while a few units claimed to support them, only one of those on test actually lets you enter a complete postcode – the Garmin Street Pilot i3.

It may have a small screen, but it has a good voice and, though its interface isn’t perfect, it comes with an attractive price tag and with the full postcode support. That’s sufficient for it to garner the first of our PCW Recommended awards, and anyone on a tight budget should give it a serious look.

The second Recommended award goes to a relative newcomer, the Novogo A30, which takes the Navigon software and builds on it with a sensible selection of buttons, a brighter interface and a reasonable – though not perfect – speaker.

With the addition of a TMC receiver, it would provide an extremely capable solution for most users and, after the first two years, would even work out cheaper than our Editor’s Choice – the Tom Tom One.

With no price premium over the other units in the test, this Tom Tom One system shows off the experience that the company has gained over the years, both with its software and the earlier all-in-ones.

It is simple to use, despite only having a touchscreen, and provides spoken instructions that are more than loud enough. We’d prefer to see the European maps costing a little less, and the same is true for the subscription service that provides traffic information.

But even without those, this outclasses the competition and really does provide a solution that you can plug in and use.

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