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As Bluetooth is becoming increasingly common among mobile devices, GPS manufacturers from all over seem to be embracing the technology and developing Bluetooth GPS receivers. In this review, I’ll examine the Deluo Bluetooth GPS Receiver and Deluo’s own Routis navigation software. I have to admit that from the beginning, Deluo was up against some stiff competition since it was competing against my Pioneer Avic-N1 in-dash navigation system. But in the end, the combination of Deluo’s receiver and the Routis software thoroughly impressed and surprised me!
INTRODUCTION
Bluetooth was designed to be a close range wireless link, and it proves perfect in this application. The wireless connection allows the receiver to be placed on the dashboard without unsightly wires or cables. The receiver is very small, measuring 3.5” long, 2” wide and .75” deep. It maintains a very strong satellite connection, even allowing me to connect from within the second floor of my house! The Routis software is well planned, extremely functional, and surprisingly complete.
WHAT’S HOT
Setup was pretty easy and straightforward. The package they sent is to review didn’t seem to be one of their retail packages, so I don’t have a pretty picture of the box to show here.
SETUP
The latest version of the Routis software on top of the Deluo receiver.
Inside the box is the Bluetooth receiver,
a power adapter, a car adapter, and setup instructions.
The receiver and chargers.
The top of the receiver has three
indicator LEDs.
The back has two rubber pads, which provide minimal gripping.
The back has a charger plug, a power switch, and a pairing button.
The side adorns an antenna port for use with an external antenna.
The indicator lights were useful and easy to read. The leftmost LED is blue and provided Bluetooth connection status. When the receiver is not connected, the blue LED blinks. When it is connected, it remains illuminated. The topmost LED is blue and shows satellite status. Like the Bluetooth LED, when the receiver cannot pick up a satellite, the LED blinks, and when connected it remains lit. The third and rightmost LED is for power. When charging, the LED is amber. When the battery is low, the LED is red, and when charged, the LED remains green. Installation of the software was equally as simple. Upon inserting the first CD, the usual splash screen appears and takes you through the installation process.
After selecting your installation preferences (for this review I installed only the Pocket PC software) the usual Pocket PC software installation pops up and installs on the next sync. The MapLoader software then opens up and walks you through adding maps to your Pocket PC.
The install gives you the option to install the MapLoader (required) and either Laptop or Pocket PC software.
The MapLoader prompts you with this warning, suggesting that a storage card is the best approach.
The MapLoader software is very easy to use, allowing you to get only the maps you need and want. The software also allows you to specify the location of the maps, either memory or storage card. Therefore, you can store entire states or cities on specific storage cards and stop as needed. Once software is installed and maps are loaded, the software must be set up to use the receiver.
MapLoader opens, giving you the above map, allowing you to customize the maps on your Pocket PC.
There is also the ability to select your state, city, target location, and map radius for a particular trip.
There are few setup steps to do with the Routis application. There is an auto configure option to setup the GPS receiver, which can figure out what type of receiver is being used. In this case, we are using a Bluetooth receiver.
Routis always displays this warning when starting the program, as do most navigation systems.
Routis attempts to find the Bluetooth GPS receiver, seen above as DeluoGPS.
Once you tap on the DeluoGPS device, it asks for a Passkey, which is just 0000.
Once the above steps are completed, the Deluo receiver is paired with the device and the software is ready to go!
Once everything was charged and configured, I took the Deluo GPS system out for a test drive.
PRODUCT FEATURES
My Pocket PC navigation compared to my Pioneer Avic-N1.
Immediately I realized two of the downfalls with using a Pocket PC for navigation rather than an in-dash unit. First is the obvious screen size. My in-dash unit has a much larger screen, designed specifically for use in sunlight. This makes it generally easier on the eyes while trying to drive. Secondly, the speakers in most Pocket PCs are generally very underpowered for use in an environment like a car. My in-dash unit has the ability to mute my music and play voice alerts over the speakers in the car. This could be solved with a cassette adapter or an FM modulator to play the Pocket PC through your car stereo. While these are not problems specific to the Deluo navigation system, I still thought it was worth mentioning. But since the price of most in-dash navigation systems is about $1600, these problems don’t seem that bad.
Every time you start Routis, it asks you to select the Bluetooth receiver.
The Routis layout was fairly intuitive and thoughtfully laid out. The current location is noted by the green arrow, surrounded by a circle. The arrow points in the direction you are heading. The red arrow in the top right corner points north. The big blue menu button brings you to the navigation menu, allowing you to work most of the menus and options with your finger instead of a stylus, making it easier to use in the car. The volume button allows the volume to be changed, muted, or previewed. The scale on the bottom of the screen shows how far zoomed in the screen is, and the +/- buttons allow the scale to be changed. Zooming can also be done with the up/down directional pad, which I found very useful. To the right of the scale is a white box with the current speed of the vehicle. Tapping this box will also show the distance to your destination, your ETA, or the remaining time on your route. The very bottom of the screen displays the current street and usually a range of house numbers.
The basic map view in Routis.
After tapping the Menu button, the Routis menu appears. From here you can select a destination, change various options, view GPS information, or even record a route that you’re driving on.
Tapping the blue menu button brings you to this screen.
The GPS Info shows a wealth of information, including satellite locks and current location.
When the “Destinations” option is selected from the navigation menu, the Set Destination screen will appear. From here you can select a variety of options. Selecting address allows you to enter a regular address, house number and street name. Intersection allows the selection of two intersecting roads, in case an actual address is not known. Points of Interest is a useful feature that allows searching of restaurant, banks, gas stations, and other useful places. Contacts allows an address to be used out of your Pocket PCs contact list. Favorites are locations that you can set and bookmark, and recent are destinations that you’ve previously been to.
Routis gives you many ways to search for a destination.
Routis offers a variety of useful points of interest.
Routis gives you the option to search by name, distance, and city.
Points of interested listed by distance.
A destination is now set to my selected point of interest.
Points of interest are not found on all GPS navigation systems, so I was pleased to see that Deluo included it within their Routis software. It becomes useful when you’re in need of a gas station or searching for the nearest Taco Bell. The image above shows the map view with a route set. When a route is set, the next turn is shown by a large arrow in the top right corner. The next street is shown at the very top of the screen, and the distance to the turn onto that street is located in the white box at the top. One feature that Routis has and unfortunately my in-dash navigation system does not is the ability to display the distances in feet. On my in-dash unit, any small distances are displayed as .1 mile, which can sometimes cause you to miss a turn that you’re not expecting. Being able to see the distance in smaller units helps show you where exactly it wants you to go.
Translucent information blocks allow you to see the map beneath them, which is a very cool feature.
Approaching a turn brings up a different view.
When a turn is close, Routis displays the above view of the map. This proved useful because even if your map is zoomed, Routis will still showed this zoomed in view of the turn so you know where to go. The name of the street becomes bold, and a large green arrow on the map marks the turn. On the right, a status bar shows you how far away from the turn you are. As you get closer, the bar decreases and the distance above the bar will change.
The distance bar helps you pinpoint your turn.
Pressing the left/right directional pad will switch between the map view and the route list view. I liked this because being able to see your whole trip, turn by turn, can give you a better sense of where you are going. The directional pad also made it easy to switch back and forth with just the use of your thumb.
The route list shows you text directions.
Tapping a location will bring up an options menu.
Tapping and holding on a location on the map will bring up an options menu. From this menu, you can set that point as your location, your starting point, or even a way point or “stopover” point. From this menu, you can also view information about the location or save the location to your favorites.
Choosing info will show you information about the location.
One convenient feature was the ability to tap and drag the map, panning it around. This allows you to see the streets ahead or search for a particular street by moving the map around. Pressing the big red “X” in the bottom right corner brought the map back to the current location and back to your route. All of these small functions and giant buttons seem like unimportant features, but they help make the software extremely easy to use and intuitive.
The maps can be moved around and panned.
Address Destinations
Entering an address as a destination is fairly straightforward. Routis makes it as easy as possible by always updating it’s information with possible matches as you type. This is useful when searching for streets whose name is uncertain. For example, there’s a road near my house referred to as “South Bay Road”, but my in-dash navigation system calls it “Bay Rd, S”. Typing these in, I quickly found that Routis called it “Bay Road” and figured out the south on its own.
Searching for an address lets you narrow your search by either street or city.
As you enter the street name, the list updates with possible matches.
Once a street is entered, Routis shows you range of house numbers you can select.
After a street and house number are selected, a list of possible matches is shown.
Intersection Destinations
Using an intersection as a destination is useful in times where an exact address is unknown. We’ve all heard the line before where this place is on the corner of this street and that street. Being able to locate an intersection will allow you to find that exact location without having to lookup it’s address in the yellow pages. The most useful part of this feature is that once you give Routis the first street, it will return a list of intersecting streets. Therefore even if you do not know the exact name of one of the streets, you can at least attempt to figure it out.
Searching by intersection is useful when an exact address is unknown.
Once the first street is selected, all intersecting streets are listed.
Safety Features
Speed alert and Fog Driving are two options I have not ever seen before on a navigation system. Speed alert allows you to set either a predefined speed, or a speed relative to the road you are on, and alert you when you exceed that speed. While it does not know the speed limits of the roads, Routis knows which roads are highways, main roads, and side streets, and can pick an automatic speed based on that. Turning on Fog Driving will cause Routis to make an audible beep when you encounter any intersections. In my opinion, this is a very cool feature, allowing you to take extra caution when crossing roads where oncoming traffic may not see you under foggy conditions.
Safety features
Speed alert helps you keep your driving speed in check.
Route Options
Routis provides an acceptable amount of options when it comes to creating routes. While I have seen applications with more options, I have also seen applications with much less.
Routis provides all the useful route options.
The common options seen here are quickest route and shortest route. This will change the method of route computation. Quickest will take into account the speed of the road, favoring highways and main roads. Shortest will find the shortest distance based on road length. Major and local, are similar to an “avoid highway” option, which is common to some navigation systems. Major seems to also favor highways and main roads. Reduce Turns is a cool feature which will favor a straighter route, useful if you’re driving an RV or larger vehicle where tight turns can be a problem. Then you have the option to exclude toll roads or carpool roads. One option that my in-dash unit has and Routis lacks is the ability to find more than one route for a destination, showing you up to three different routes and allowing you to pick the one that suites your taste.
Display Options
Certain parts of Routis can be customized to your taste, but things like layouts, menus, colors, etc. are not able to be changed. While I’m sure there are some of us who would want to “make that red button not so red”, for most people, simple seems to be better.
The Display Options screen allows for simple customization.
Map orientation is the most common option with navigation systems, allowing the map to be viewed with either North always facing up, or the direction you are headed to be facing up. I’ve always chosen”Heading Up” because it allows the driver to better visualize where the roads are in relation to the map. It more closely resembles the view of the driver. Color scheme is a cool feature, not common to all navigation systems.
The color scheme gives you either a bright display, or a darker display. The Night scheme helps to create less light within the car, allowing the driver to better see what is outside the windows. The Auto scheme will choose either Day or Night, depending on the time of day.
Color scheme set to Day.
Color scheme set to Night.
The next two options are Guidance Screen and POI Icons. The Guidance Screen allows you to turn off the screen that appears when you approach a turn. Turning this to manual will prevent it from automatically appearing at each turn, although it can still be manually viewed if necessary. POI icons are point of interest icons that appear on the map.
POI icons can be shown on the map to indicate where gas stations or restaurants are located.
POI icons will appear on the map near their location. The icon that appears will portray the type of POI it is, such as a gas station or a bank.
Tapping a POI icon tells you the name and lets you choose it as a destination.
The final display option is the 3D Map View. This will put the map in a “3D mode”, attempting to make it more realistic and closer to the drivers actual view.
3D view 1.
3D view 2.
3D view 3.
3D mode basically skews the map, putting it at a sort of angle, as if you were looking down on it. It sometimes allows you to see further into the direction you’re going, but for the most part, I found the 2D view a lot more functional and easier to look at.
Other Options
Other options include the ability to change the units for distance, changing GPS receiver options, and even switching between the standard Pocket PC keyboard or the Routis built-in keyboard.
The distance units can be changed depending on your preference.
Routis can be easy configured to use either a serial GPS receiver or a Bluetooth GPS receiver.
Voice Navigation
The Routis software uses voice prompts to alert the driver of turns and upcoming events. This helps the driver navigate without having to continually look at the screen of the Pocket PC, which could be distraction while driving a vehicle. The voice prompts used by Routis were rather pleasant and enjoyable. The voice is a soft, female voice that would instruct you to “Turn left” or “veer right”. It would even speak highway names such as “In 300 ft, turn right onto I-81 south”. It is definitely a step above some other Pocket PC navigation software I’ve used, such as Ostia which comes with Pharos products. This voice can be muted using the volume control, which is accessible through the volume button on the map screen. The only problem, which I mentioned above, is that the speaker in the Pocket PC is much to underpowered for a noisy car environment. I usually drive with music on and windows open, making that soft, female voice almost impossible to understand.
The help built into the Routis application was very useful, providing explanations for every option and some tutorials to do basic tasks. One thing I noticed was a lack of patches, updates, or new maps on the Deluo web site. I could not find anything in MapLoader leading to a location for updated maps. Perhaps this is one of those situations where new maps come with the next big release of the software?
HELP SUPPORT
The requirements listed on the Deluo web site for a Pocket PC is a Microsoft Pocket PC based handheld device with ARM based microprocessor, 32 MB RAM and 65 MB storage card. While the storage card is technically optional, the amount of space will truly depend on the maps you install with the program. My install, consisting of the application and a city wide map of Cicero, NY, used about 22 MB on my storage card. This seems a little greedy on space, but maps can be added and removed as necessary. A Microsoft Windows 98SE/2000/ME/XP based computer is also needed with 64 MB RAM or more in order to install and use the MapLoader software to load maps onto your Pocket PC.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Routis performed very well in terms of routing and rerouting. If a turn
BUGS AND WISHES
was missed, Routis would find a new route almost instantaneously. But
the maps weren’t as great as I thought they could be. There appeared
to be no bodies of water, such as lakes or rivers. Water would have
helped to distinguish bridges and made the map a little more realistic.
I also thought the zooming and panning could have been better. When
zoomed out, most of the roads disappeared, showing only major highways.
Panning the map to find a location becomes hard when there are no local
streets or bodies of water to use as a reference. Also, when the POI
icons are enabled on the map, it appears that only a few of them actually
show up, limited to mostly banks and gas stations. Restaurants and shopping
facilities didn’t appear where I expected them to be. One wish I have
is something that the Ostia program actually had, and that’s frequent
map updates. It would be comforting to know that somewhere in the future,
an updated map of my area will be available to me. But with Routis,
I haven’t found any indication of that.
The Deluo Bluetooth Navigation System can be purchased from the Deluo web site directly at. The regular price is $248.99 but there seems to be a discount now, marking it down to $219.99. The Routis software can be purchased alone directly from the Deluo web site for $89.90.
PURCHASING
PROS
Receiver holds a strong satellite lock
Fast rerouting and good routes
Easy to use interface, suitable for use without a stylus
- Intelligent features for safety and map display
- Voice navigation was useful and plea sent
CONS
Maps take up a large amount of space
Maps lacked bodies of water
Many points of interest did not show up on the map as POI icons
Overall, the Routis Bluetooth navigation system worked better than I could have hoped. While it still won’t replace my in-dash navigation system because of the small Pocket PC screen and small speaker, it would definitely be my first choice when looking for a Pocket PC solution. The features were comparable to that of more expensive units, while the price for both the receiver and software is very reasonable!
OVERALL
IMPRESSION
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