Pharos' Pocket GPS Portable Navigator (2/2)

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SOFTWARE EXPLORATION

Upon first run, Ostia presents you with a splash screen and steps you through the process of configuring your GPs receiver.

We're told that if we crash, it's our fault. Very comforting.

Next, we choose the style of receiver we will be using. The first is the CF style, which does not require a COM port. The second is the device-specific receiver that plugs into the proprietary port at the base of your Pocket PC.

Next, we select the device we're using. Not completely sure why we are asked for this information, though it likely auto-senses how to access the GPs receiver. To begin accessing satellite data, select GPS--Enable GPs (the red frown will change to a yellow ambivalent facial expression).

After a considerable amount of time (satellite acquisition time from a cold start often took up to ten minutes!), you'll finally get data, and your little friend will turn green. These pictures are not retouched; there's actually a smiley face in the command bar. You can view your current position by selecting GPS--GPS Info. During the wait, why not read a chapter of your favorite novel?

GPS--Sat Info shows you which satellites are accessible (gray bars) and which you have properly connected to (blue bars). I typically had access to eight satellites, though if you are lucky you can access twelve satellites in parallel.

To start doing anything in Ostia, we need to open a map file. Note that you can have more than one map can opened at a time, if, for example, you need to create a cross-country route. The idea of having one regional map for an entire trip makes a lot more sense than opening up several maps for a long trip, which has a big impact on performance.

Moving throughout the map is a matter of clicking the blue arrows and dragging your stylus across the screen to draw a zoom box. I'm ready to drive. Let's create a route.

Under "Find," you can define a route based upon an address, intersection, POI, or Waypoint. We've seen each of these options in previous reviews. Here we'll look at a route based upon an address.

Enter a piece of the street name (don't include street specifics like the part of the road, else you'll get no "hits"). Instead of clicking several times, as in the other programs, highlight the entry you want, and hit "Next."

Highlight the town or city.

Enter the address and hit "Finish."

Finally, you can store this destination as a Waypoint for future reference. We'll rely on iGPS to set the origin, so select Destination from this screen.

Although you'd expect your route to be immediately calculated at this point, you must first select Find--New Route for the calculation to take place. If iGPS is running and enabled, the trip origin is automatically set to be your current location. Conversely, if you are planning this without GPs access, you can point to places on the map and define your selections as a trip origin or trip destination and create a route based upon those two points. Either way, once that's done, you are presented with your first driving instruction.

The map presented has three colors: green surrounds your origin, blue defines the length of the trip, and red denotes the destination.

If you'd like to zoom in on either the origin or destination, do so from the View menu.

Selecting View--Directions gives you a turn-by-turn output of your trip. Make sure you look for "NO NAME" street, else you'll find your way to NOWHERE!

Defining a route by intersection brings up the same street explorer as above, but route by POI is a bit different. Unfortunately, Ostia's POI database is pretty limited. Though the categories are broad . . .

there aren't many items within each category. Hopefully this aspect of the program will improve with time.

PERFORMANCE AND ACCURACY

    Turn-by-turn navigation was taken care of by a soft-spoken female voice without any huge arrows telling me where to turn, though large signs are something I've come to appreciate. My only notification came from the voice and information in the direction pane at the bottom of the map screen (not full-screen like Pocket CoPilot or TeleType). Accuracy was on par with the Copilot system, though not as stellar as the WorldNavigator from Teletype

HELP SUPPORT

A quick overview of basic Ostia functions is available in a Help file.

OPTIONS

You'll likely want to keep Auto Reroute enabled at all times, though I find that it wasn't too quick to suggest a new path (it would repeat "Off Path! Off Path!"). Heading Up keeps the top of the map pointing in the same direction as your traveling. Turn off the voice if she bothers you.

If you opt to use another receiver with Ostia, you can manually select the COM port here. Teletype is more friendly to other GPs systems in that you can actually view the NMEA data being transmitted by the receiver. It's more of a guessing game with Ostia.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

BUGS AND WISHES

    If you are planning short trips, where you remain within one map's boundaries, you'll have no problem, but getting several maps' data onto your Pocket PC is a tedious process. First, you must click on each region within MapHelper, which will launch a WinZip Self-Executable. Then extract those files to a local directory. Then move all of those files over to your Pocket PC. Pocket CoPilot's execution of this is far superior. I reckon I'm dodging an important issue: the map files are very large. Though they compress about 50% using ZIP, once on your Pocket PC, they are (sophisticated math here) twice the size of the original ZIP file. So each of the three data CD's has about a gigabyte of data on it. Not sure how many of you have anywhere near that in internal memory, but I'm stuck with 64 mb, most of which is already used by other stuff. Don't expect to keep many maps on your device at a time. It is for this reason that the device-specific, non-CF version of Portable Navigator might be a wiser purchase, so you can slam a CompactFlash card into the CF slot.

    A pretty significant quirk is that if you happen to be somewhere that has no map data (for example, a new residential street that is tangent to any number of older, major roads listed in the Ostia database), Ostia gets confused and refuses to create a routing for you, not even one that starts at a predefined point closest to your current location. Even when I manually selected a close road as the origin and another point as the destination, I got the same complaint. Perhaps I was doing something wrong here, but it would make sense that since I was forcing a known origin to be used that my current position wouldn't be factored in.

PURCHASING

PROS

• Pocket PC-friendly client

• Points of interest included automatically
• Client is small and undemanding
• Warm satellite acquisition is fast
• Regular software/database updates free online

CONS

• Cold start requires up to ten minute wait

• POI database is very limited
• Rerouting feature is easily defeated
• No large arrows to indicate suggested turns

• Downloading maps to Pocket PC is tedious

OVERALL IMPRESSION

   Should you prefer other Pocket PC software to Ostia 2002, because the iGPS-CF is NMEA-compliant, most products will accept the receiver. Experiment and find for yourself a database that has the newest gaps in your region. Please let us know in the discussion thread if you have worked with Ostia and found the database to be particularly weak or strong.