PC and printer mogul Hewlett-Packard (HP) is not a complete stranger to the navigational market. Of course, it’s always been possible to navigate using HP’s iPAQ PDA’s in combination with TomTom software, and in 2006 there was the iPAQ rx5000 Travel Companion series, which was basically a PDA, but with a greater accent on navigating.Still, we dare to say that for HP, the navigational adventure only started last September, when they announced the HP iPAQ 314 Travel Companion series. It was clear this unit was HP’s try at taking the navigational market seriously.
Top 3
During the presentation of the device in the Photo Museum in Amsterdam, Peter Meulenberg, director of the Imaging & Printing Group was very clear about HP’s general company strategy: ‘If you don’t see a way of getting into the top 3 of a certain market segment, then don’t even try altogether.’ And since the 314 has been available for a while now, we can only conclude that HP still sees a chance to reach this goal. The question for the current top 3 in navigational land is of course: ‘Should we be worried about this new device from HP?’ We from yourNAV had a look at this new device, and will try to answer this question to the best of our abilities.
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The HP iPAQ 314 Travel Companion is shipped in a colourful package inside which we find all we need: the PND itself, a solid and elegant car mount with suction cup, a 12/24 volt charger, a home charger, a USB cable and a fancy artificial leather slip cover. According to the manual there should also be a dashboard mount disc in the box, but there wasn’t one with our review sample.
Neither the 220 volt nor the 12/24 volt power plugs have a fixed lead, but a USB cable can be connected to either of them which can then be plugged in the HP PND. We’ve seen this option before on several MP3 players, the iPod for one, but never before with a PND. This is a very nice solution.
The device
When we hold the iPAQ 314 in our hands, we find it to be a compact, handy and light (87 grams) PND, which can be easily carried in the pocket of your jacket. If we look at the unit from all angles, we see a stylus pen (1) on the top left, which can be used for accurately operating the touch screen. On the top middle, we see the on/off button (2). Below the 4.3 inch touch screen, there’s the hole for the built in microphone (3) and a small led which lights up blue when the Bluetooth function is enabled.
On the left hand side there’s the memory card slot for an (optional) SD/MMC card. There’s also a multifunction rotary controller (6) with which the quick menu can be opened and operated? Below that, behind a rubber cover (7) there are the connections for the (optional) external antenna, external audio and USB for charging the unit and connecting it to the computer. On the bottom there’s the reset button (8). There’s also an additional opening on the bottom of the 314 for the external microphone (9).
On the back there’s a large cover which protects the rechargeable battery. Yes, this means this battery is replaceable, which is a good thing. A fully charged battery (1,700 mAh) lasted almost 140 minutes during our test.
All in all we find HP has created a very nice looking and complete device with the 314.
Screen
From the very first announcement of this device, we immediately noticed the reported specifications of the screen. This 4.3 inch touch screen is supposed to feature an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, and that’s a first in PND land as far as we know. All other competing units still function at 480 x 272 pixels. This means the 314 has about 3 times as many pixels in the same physical area. You can imagine we were very curious how this would look in practice.And we were certainly not disappointed! In one word: WOW! Everything looks crystal clear on the screen of this PND. The menus especially take good advantage of this high resolution. All the icons look very detailed and any text is really razor sharp. The navigational screen itself seems to take less advantage of this higher resolution. Though the street names are also displayed razor sharp on the screen, the landmarks used in the Tele Atlas 3D maps don’t give that same ‘Wow’ effect. But we’re sure this has
everything to do with the lower quality of the map material graphics. This could be Tele Atlas’ fault, and not HPs. Despite that, we still think the implementation of these kind of high resolution screens are a true step forward, and we really hope other manufacturers will follow HPs example.In practice
The car mount with suction cup works great. The compact and solid mount can be easily attached to the windshield, and attaching/removing the 314 from it is very easy with the lever on top. One small negative point is the fact that the horizontal adjustability of the unit is not all that good: the ball joint is rather limited when it comes to sideways movement.During our drives with the iPAQ we quickly found out that this PND is very capable of performing its most important task. The combined Centrality Titan processor/GPS chip provided a quick and constant GPS fix, and the system led us to our destination perfectly every time. But still, we have a feeling that it’s all just not good enough, that the 314 is not always as user friendly and some things are downright bad even. We’ll try to illustrate our sentiment here with a couple of examples.
Nav ‘n' GO
HP uses the navigational software of Nav ‘n' GO, a company widely known and renowned for their iGO software. This software has been adapted to the 314 and is filled to the brim with buttons and options. While this may seem nice at first, we quickly find out how
less can actually be more, if you know what we mean. Some options (like eg. clearing a route) took a very long time to find. There are simply too many options, and they end up making the unit feel less user friendly.Another annoying thing is the ‘Attention – don’t operate this device while driving’ screen we were shown every time we turned the device on. Ok, so this screen quickly disappears every time by simply tapping the screen, but it would be better if we could somehow disable it altogether.
As already mentioned, the HP uses a dual-core Centrality Titan CPU with integrated GPS receiver, which runs at 600 MHz. Combined with the integrated 128 MB of SDRAM, this device should really be screaming fast, no? Erm… not really. The general feeling when operating the device is that everything is going rather slowly. The responses to the screen taps are often slow, and the switching to a different screen can also hardly be called ‘swift’. Every now and then a ‘please wait’… notification shows on the screen, which stays there for as long as 10 to 15 seconds! This is simply too much!
Route calculation
Another way to prove a 600 MHz CPU does not guarantee speedy calculation, is by having the iPAQ 314 do our standard route calculations which we introduced last year in our ‘Three high-end models compared’ special and will be using as a point of reference from now on.HP iPAQ 314 Travel Companion | |||
| Route calculation | iPAQ 314 | GO 920 | |
| Maastricht (sec) | 18.7 | 7.5 | |
| Rheims (sec) | 33.2 | 17.3 | |
| Vienna (sec) | 45.3 | 22.5 | |
| Rome (sec) | 108.0 | 29.2 | |
As you can see: the 314 will not set any speed records. The scores of the 314 are nowhere near the scores of the TomTom GO 920, the fastest PND in our tests of last year. Where the GO only needs about 76.5 seconds total for the calculation of all four routes, the HP needs a shameful 205.2 seconds! (3.5 minutes)
We’re not quite sure what causes this sluggishness. Ok, driving the 800 x 480 pixel screen most likely demands more of the CPU than a lower resolution screen would, but that cannot be the only reason. It’s very clear HP has still got a lot of work in this department.
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Voices
HP’s PND features text-to-speech, an option which we very much applaud. So at first, we were very happy to see this option implemented… until we heard HOW it was implemented. That quickly tempered our enthusiasm.There are two English voices, named Simon and Kate, just like with TomTom units, but unlike TomTom the voices supplied with the 314 don't sound good at all. They sound hissy, and both talk way too fast. And trust us when we say this becomes really annoying really fast!
These kinds of (sometimes small) sloppy issues don’t do the general impression of the unit any good. Another example: the date is initially show via the 'Universal Convention' of YYYY-MM-DD. No problem, because this is easily adjustable in the software to our usual DD-MM-YYYY notation. We were very surprised to see however that every time, without warning or reason, this notification was reset again to the original setting. Maddening!
Features
As already stated, the 314 holds a lot of features and options within its adapted iGO software. The playing of video and MP3's, the viewing of photos and even the playing of some games: it’s all possible with this PND. There’s also a calculator, a world clock and the Outlook contact folder can be synchronised with it. This last feature works great in practice, and is a very handy starting point for testing the built-in hands free phoning option via a Bluetooth connection to your mobile phone. Which we also did, of course.Pairing with our Nokia phone turned out to be no problem for the HP 314. We were less enthused about the quality of the hands free phone calls though. We could easily understand the contact on the other end of the line, but the sound was very shrill and no joy to listen to. Our contact claimed we sounded very ‘hollow’, as if we were phoning from inside a cave.
One aspect which HP highlighted last year during the presentation of the iPAQ 314 was the online support for the device. The company created a website especially for this purpose, where users can download updates and share routes after registration. All very nice, but why can we only select cities in the USA then? A true shame…
