Harman Kardon GPS-510 4-inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator and Media Player

High-end audio equipment manufacturer Harman Kardon's continues to combine solid navigation with truly superb media player function in its GPS products, creating a bar for navigator/personal entertainment system convergence devices. They've improved their models this year with a fuller feature set...Harman Kardon GPS-510 4-inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator and Media Player

Feature Set
With their first line of GPS navigators released last year, H-K wisely stuck to the basics with their navigation. Perhaps that was the reason navigation worked so much better on Harman Kardon's devices than on some other navigators produced by manufactuer's whose core business was not GPS.

With basic nav nailed down however, Harman Kardon added a full feature set into this year's models. All of the new models -- the GPS-310, GPS-510, and GPS-810, -- come with text-to-speech for spoken directions with real street names, a photo viewer and MP3 player. The GPS-510 adds a video player and traffic data capability (from TMC Clear Channel). The GPS-810 has the same features you'd get on the top-end model from any manufacturer, and some you may not expect, including Bluetooth connectivity, traffic data, an FM transmitter that will deliver both directions and music through an open channel on your car's stereo system, and a nifty little Bluetooth remote.

Main Screen

4-inch WQVGA 480px x 272px high-resolution widescreen touch screen (actual size)
Navigation
The main purpose of any car GPS device is to take you reliably from point A to B. Here the GPS-510 performs nicely indeed, providing several options for finding your destination. To get going you can select either a street address, a specific point of interest such as a gas station or restaurant, a recent or saved destination, a postal code, or an intersection (if you're not sure of the exact address). To speed up text entry, the unit employs an intelligent auto-completion feature that displays only the letters that spell an item in its database. This greatly reduces the letters from which you have to choose to tell it where you want to go.

Once it knows where you are headed, the device offers you the choice of shortest distance or most use of freeways or other high-speed arterials. You'll also find a trip planner that lets you lay out and save multiple destinations, as well as avoidance choices for routing your trip away from borders, toll roads, unpaved roads, ferries, and more. If you take a wrong turn or need to use a detour, the GPS-510 will automatically re-route you and get you back on your way.

And how did the GPS-510 perform out on the road? In a word, admirably. The responsiveness of the device and excellent user interface make it a joy to use. The GPS-510 also has an extremely fast and accurate GPS signal processor, so it locks, calculates and recalculates routes, and responds to commands quickly. One of the hardest things for a manufacturer without a long history in building GPS navigators is getting the routing algorithms correct, so it was nice to see that Harman Kardon seems to have gotten this right. In most cases, the device decided on logical and efficient routes, too--something that can't be said of all GPS devices out there...Harman Kardon GPS