Medion GoPal PNA470

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/handhelds/0,39030065,49291707,00.htm

Reviewed 19 July 2007

Reviewed by Mark Harris

With TomTom dominating the in-car GPS market, newcomers like Medion have to pile on the features to get a look in. Its range-topping PNA470 has full European mapping, TMC traffic info, Bluetooth connections and multimedia extras. It's available now for just under £300.

Strengths
Never mind the brand name, just feel the size. Medion has recently emerged as a major player in PDAs, PCs and sat-navs, with the 470 following its tradition for providing a full range of features at a reasonable price. (You can also buy the GoPal PNA460 for £100 less, which is essentially the same unit without the Bluetooth and included TMC traffic updates.)

Its 22mm black plastic case is small and light (200g), with a large 109mm (4.3-inch) widescreen display that's bright and sharp enough for daylight use. Unlike most sat-navs, you can operate the touchscreen with either your finger or the stylus provided -- this definitely helps when trying to select exact spots on a map.

Street level maps for 32 countries are provided, with UK data pre-loaded on a 1GB SD card. GPS sensitivity is average for the latest sat-navs: it locks on through windows, usually within just a couple of minutes. The display is simple but clear and voice guidance is timely, crisp and loud.

Address searching (with full postcodes) is easy, as is navigation to thousands of useful points of interest, such as local restaurants and tourist sights as well as national chains. Route calculation is fast and reliable, including speed camera alerts.

Bluetooth hands-free is also well handled, pairing up with compatible mobiles in moments, although voice calls sound mushy and compressed.

Weaknesses
The PDA heritage of the 470 is clear to see, with menus that are terse and far from intuitive. The 2D maps are cluttered, while 3D mapping goes the other way, excluding useful infomation. We weren't convinced by the accuracy of the Medion's mapping and display. Selecting a street with the stylus occasionally pulled up the name of the neighbouring road, and the names of some common city streets simply weren't shown at all.

Voice guidance attempts to speak road names out loud. Unfortunately, it sometimes says the number of a road instead of speaking the actual name, giving directions such as 'turn right on to the B two thousand one hundred and nineteen in fifty metres'. There's also little in the way of navigational overviews, such as browsing your route beforehand.

We didn't get much use from the free TMC traffic info as the unit had trouble locking on to a TMC radio station during our test.

The extra functions on board the Medion are hardly worth the space. You can download media files from your Bluetooth phone but getting pictures to show in the viewer or songs to play in the MP3 player is much trickier. Not that you'll really want to anyway -- the audio interface is complex and sound quality through the speakers dire, although the headphone socket provides livelier sound.

The Berlitz Travel Guide is simply useless. It has only one destination for the UK (London), with just a handful of hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions featuring short, vague and misspelled entries.

Conclusion
Despite its definitive feature list and decent build quality, it's difficult to recommend this Medion. Its key function of navigation has just too many quirks, from a weak map display to a confusing interface.

The extra features don't add much value, leaving you a unit that would have been more attractive stripped down to the basics and with more attention paid to mapping and guidance.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield