It may just be me, but GPS isn’t something I can really get excited about. If it works well then you don’t get unnecessarily irritated by the incessant and patronising instructional voice. You also manage to find your way to your chosen destination without panicked instructions informing you to get back on the road (the M6 toll road is one such example – my GPS couldn’t cope with it adequately for some time and seemed genuinely irked that I was driving through farmland!).
HP have gone some way to remedy this lack of excitement by providing a dedicated 3D GPS display. The 4.3” monitor on the HP iPaq 314 displays your location and surroundings in full technicolour 3D glory. So now, instead of driving down a red line you could be driving down a graphical representation of a main road, accurately depicted as a Sim City type landscape.
I’m still struggling to get hugely excited – although the specs do peak my interest a little more. A 600MHz processor is hugely impressive for what is essentially a computerised A to Z; as is the 128MB RAM that is also included.
If you regularly travel on work, you just don’t like getting lost, or you’ve plain run out of gadgets to spend your money on then the HP iPaq 314 is about as impressive as a GPS can actually get. That is, until they develop one that can play eye spy.
