Full Review

9 March 2004 - So you’ve got your PocketPC, you use it for your contacts, diary and anything else you might imagine, but then the office decides to send you on a trip to Germany. You’ve got to fly into Berlin and then travel to some remote part of the country to find this little village where the sales guys have managed to sell in the software. How on earth are you going to know the way? Failing phoning your mate and asking them to guide you through Multimap as you drive down the road there is another way and Navman thing they have the answer.

The GPS 4410 is a Bluetooth GPS locator that can pair itself with your PocketPC. Once connected you can pinpoint your location to within about five metres. The accuracy can vary depending on a number of elements including the government invention, but the majority of the time the Global Positioning System will let you know where you are enough to plan a route.

Routes can be planned via the accompanying software SmartSt software that offers 3D maps, postcode search and avoid area stipulations if need be. The software also covers over 15 western European countries - although be warned you’ll need plenty of memory and spare SD cards to store them all on your PocketPC. Once up and running with the maps that you need installed on your PocketPC the GPS locator works in real time to remap your location whenever you move. This is handy when you miss the turning, as the system automatically recalculates the journey for you and the 30-hour battery life means you should be able to drive almost the entire breadth of Western Europe on one charge. Failing you travelling to the end of the Euro zone there is also an in-car charger in the box too keep you going.

VERDICT
The unit promises five-metre accuracy 98% of the time. In tests it was true to form. The only issue we had was the lack of information about which COM port the Bluetooth unit connected to software with. This caused us undue hassles as we had to try all nine COM ports by trial and error. Additionally the understandable size of the maps was a heavy drain on the memory space of our test PocketPC - the HP 2210 (in fact we could only fit south east England on it before we ran out of space) and therefore an additional SD card would be a worthy additional purchase.

That said, once we had got past our teething problems this was a very good and easy to use piece of kit. The portability provided by the Bluetooth element means that you can carry this unit around with ease and the use of the PocketPC, if you already have one, will save yet more devices clogging up your draw. If you’re a man about town that is constantly getting lost this will be right up your street.