Product Reviews

HP is shamelessly targeting the first-time GPS PDA buyer with the rx1950 Navigator, offering the double allure of a wireless PDA when in the pocket and a fully fledged GPS system when in the car. But it's worth emphasising that, unlike the Acer n35, which stole top honours in our recent GPS PDA Labs, the GPS receiver is integrated into the windscreen-mounted holder so GPS is only available in-car.

This isn't a fatal compromise, though, as the PDA itself is pretty fantastic. Also being sold as the plain rx1950, for around £170 plus VAT, it's based on the chassis we first fell in love with when debuted as the h1940. It's sleek and incredibly light, while the crisp, bright screen makes photos and everyday work look great. With Windows Mobile 5 in charge, it also benefits from the latest 'pocket' versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Outlook 2002 comes in the box too.

The battery is replaceable, but if it does run out there's no danger of losing your valuable data, as it's all saved to flash ROM. The only potential problem is that once you start taking advantage of the wireless LAN, you'll have to recharge it quite frequently. With WLAN on, it lasted five hours of everyday use; with WLAN off, it managed 11 hours.

Some might prefer to have Bluetooth as well, especially as the SD slot is likely to be filled by the 128MB SD card that contains all the maps (mainland UK and Northern Ireland), but it's one acceptable sacrifice in HP's battle to hit the magical sub-£300 price point.

As soon as you insert the SD card, the ViaMichelin software will install automatically. It's a basic package, as befits a basic GPS PDA, with one obvious restriction being five-figure postcode support; the market-leading navigator software from TomTom will instantly recognise seven-figure postcodes. It's theoretically better to search for destinations by street name, but again it falls behind TomTom for usability. Once we'd told the software we wanted an address in London and entered the key part of our address, it took 30 seconds to find the road on the PDA - with TomTom, the search is done in real-time.

The most important factor, though, is how well the Navigator works on the road, and your first task is to fit the car kit. Unlike many other kits, there's only one cable to worry

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about - to run the power from your cigarette lighter to the unit - but trying to stick the suction pad to your windscreen or the dashboard proved ridiculously difficult. It requires you to turn one part of the suction-cup mechanism to create the vacuum, but as there's nothing other than a few raised dots to provide any grip it proved frustrating in practice.

Twenty minutes and several swear words later, we were ready to start driving, and our first journey, based on main roads, went smoothly. The software chose exactly the same route we would, and the spoken directions were easy to hear through the loudspeaker. We were also impressed that we could switch between 2D and 3D views, and even adjust our 3D viewing perspective. Providing there are plenty of satellites in view, it's also quick when recalculating routes on the move.

The only potential problems we spotted on that initial trip were that the GPS system was around 10m out, so sometimes the voice instruction was a little later than ideal, and the instructions were less precise than TomTom. Rather than say 'bear left and then turn right', ViaMichelin says 'bear slightly left' and doesn't mention the upcoming right turn until too late. In dense cities, you'll need to keep an eye on the screen more often than we'd like.

Our second journey tested this to the limit, being a trip through central London. The outward journey went smoothly, although the lack of voice directions meant we did over-rely on the screen. We found the auto zoom at junctions to be generally good, but sometimes it zoomed in too far, making it unclear where the next turn actually was. We had to give up on the Navigator for the return trip, as it took almost two minutes to get a fix, despite the fact that the car hadn't moved - our passengers quickly grew mutinous.

But what destroyed our trust in the ViaMichelin software was our third outing. This was in Buckinghamshire, where the underlying mapping proved so imprecise it frequently told us to 'bear left' despite the fact we were approaching a T-junction, and on one occasion managed to take us to the wrong town entirely. The final straw came when travelling down a rural road: the voice instructions told us to 'go straight ahead' when passing a turn, only for it to emerge that actually, now it came to think about it, it really did want us to take the turn.

As a wireless PDA, the rx1950 is great and, partnered with the right software, would be a superb foundation of a GPS PDA system. But the ViaMichelin GPS software didn't win our confidence and we were left wanting to throw the car connector kit out of the window. If money is tight, buy the substantially cheaper Acer n35. And if you can afford the extra, choose an rx1950 with a TomTom software bundle - GPS specialists like www.totalpda.com are the places to visit.