Review: Acer d150 satellite navigation system

The d150 is Acer's first foray into the standalone satellite navigation market. With establish brands such as Tom Tom and Navman, Acer certainly has its work cut out.

Below the 9cm touchscreen display sit six backlit control buttons and a navigation joystick. These have a positive feel, are well spaced and large enough to operate without error.

Volume controls sit to the left, map controls in the centre and home and navigation menu keys are on the right.

Unlike some skinny PDA-shaped GPS devices, the d150's somewhat bootylicious form has a large rear end that, depending on the design of your car, can make dashboard placement somewhat tricky.

However, its solid form keeps the voice announcements from sounding tinny, although they occasionally distort at the highest volume.

Should you have a convenient space available, installation is very simple, using a level-operated suction cup and flexible mounting arm with a locking cradle.

An extra degree of freedom would have been useful and what appeared to be an extra arm section was included in the box, although there's no mentioned of it in the instructions and is has no obvious use.

Built-in mp3 and photo viewer programs are also included, but we doubt many people would put them to good use.

If you do want to give them a go, media can be stored on the supplied 256MB SD card (with the UK maps installed there's 71MB free) and played back using the on-screen controls.

Microsoft Activesync 3.8 allows you to sync contacts from your PC onto the d150 and navigate to their addresses by name.

Destinator DS navigation software powers the d150 and it comes with pre-installed Navteq maps of the UK and Ireland as well as major roads of Western Europe.

Wider coverage can be purchased separately.

During testing, the d150 managed to get us from A to B without any problems and the speaker had enough oomph to be heard on busy roads.

Full postcode support lets you tap in a precise address, but the lack of dynamic routing means it isn't able to adjust your route according to traffic reports.

At £299.99, the d150 sits in the budget section of the GPS market, but we still prefer the design, extra features and overall usability of the Tom Tom One) - it's also £20 cheaper.

You can check out more of the competition in our group test of budget satellite navigation devices.