Insignia NS-CNV43 - GPS receiver - automotive Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)With its impressive features, this PND could have been a winner, but sadly, it is not. The people who conjured up the specs had a good sense of the pain points that users experience with the current crop of GPS devices, and tried to address some of them. Thus, they added internet connectivity through an inbuilt cellphone data service (free for the first 12 months) to provide Google POI search, live traffic, fuel prices, movie listings, weather and even Twitter capability. The device can also receive emails containing routes configured on Google Maps or Mapquest. Combined with the device's inbuilt bluetooth connectivity, these features potentially make for a very versatile and capable GPS unit. Sadly, at this point in time, it is more potential, less reality.
The reality view shows a product that performs inadequately on many levels. First, the hardware: though the device looks slick and feels rugged, its touch screen is insensitive and requires considerable force to press on. After a while, this can be quite irritating. Satellite acquisition is quite fast from a stationary position, though excruciatingly slow from a moving vehicle. Worse, the unit's processor is much too slow, leading to long boot up times, and often significant delays in searching, calculating, and recalculating. For people who are already used to reasonably fast Garmin and Tom Tom devices, this one will get the hackles up a bit. The unit's core navigation capabilities also leave something to be desired. Address search is easy, but for some reason the unit can't find all to many addresses even though it uses the same Navteq maps as Garmin. There is the option of searching for intersections, but many intersections do not show up on search, making the feature of limited utility. The inbuilt POI database is supposed to have 2 million addresses, though I could not find any of the main POIs I was looking for in many categories. Additionally, there is no search function for the POI database, which makes the database quite useless really. Google search via the connected service is good, though every now and then the connection to the servers can't be established, and you have to try again. Using Google search while in motion makes the search and download slower for some reason.
Routing is done with a slight difference on this unit: you are required to select from 3 routing options for each destination (thus adding one additional step in the process) , though 2 of the 3 options are usually much longer or completely illogical. Even the best option is not always the same route as you'd get on a Garmin or Tom Tom, or on Google Maps - sometimes it is longer and slower. The option of importing a route from Google Maps via the email function is buggy - the imported route gets garbled and truncated arbitrarily, making this a useless feature. The auto zoom function is not well implemented: if your turn is over a mile away, the route trace gets reduced to a barely visible squiggle at the bottom of the screen, while the rest of the screen shows a map with very little detail. Closer to your turn, the view switches to oom in and the route trace becomes much bigger (though still occupying only a fraction of the screen) and can show several turns on the screen all together, which gives a good sense of your upcoming manoeuvers. This can be seen as a benefit or a distraction depending on your taste, but I like it. At this zoom level, the surrounding map also shows much more detail than Ive seen on other GPS units, giving a much better sense of the neighborhood than you'd get on a Garmin or Tom Tom. Turn by turn voice guidance is preceded by a ding ( a la Magellan), and comes 3 times before the actual turn, though voice clarity is not great and you can easily mistake a "turn left" for a "turn right" if you are not looking at the screen. Like Garmin GPS and unlike Tom Tom, this unit tells you which side of the road your destination is on, which is a definite plus. A big minus for a unit with as many features as this one is the absence of lane guidance.
Bluetooth is not well done on this unit. I struggled to pair the unit with my Motorola phone (it took multiple attempts before it connected), and every time I shut the unit down and started up again, it would no longer recognize my phone, and I had to go through the pairing process again. There is no phone book on the unit and you can't download your contacts from your cell phone to your GPS. The handsfree function is adequate, but sound quality is quite metallic and noisy.
All in all this PND was well conceived (kudos for that) but implemented poorly and needs to go back to engineering for a make over.

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