PolNav GPS Navigation

July 7th, 2009 nk Posted in GPS | No Comments »

PolNav is a fairly good GPS navigation program. But first a short description: PolNav is the product of PolstarGPS. It has a number of features that are standard on all GPS navigation programs and a number that are not. The company website has most of the relevant descriptions as well as screen shots.

We tested this PolNav version 5 on an unlocked Mio Moov 310.

Installation was easy and the program started quickly. The setup menu has an option to find the GPS automatically. PolNav found the GPS and several satellites within a minute or so. Not bad for a cold start. In subsequent operation (after exiting the program through its menu) satellites were found within seconds.

The main map display is clear and fairly informative and PolNav will bring you where you are going. It has three route options: Fast, Short and Economical. We didn’t see a difference in routing between Economical and Short, but generally the routing makes sense.

The program does not have Text To Speech, which is a serious shortcoming in the current market where major competitors have TTS and pronounce the name of the next street you need to turn on. A more bothersome deficiency is the program’s baffling menu and search system.

If you want to find an address you will be confronted by a menu with three options: Near Car, Near Cursor, City/Postcode. The Near Car and Near Cursor choices will present you with a list of streets that is searchable by name. The problem is that the list includes streets in a radius of approximately 1.5 miles. Anything beyond this radius is not on the list. It would have been great if PolNav could search in a greater radius – say 30 miles – as is, this feature is unique but not very useful. To find a street that is more than 1.5 miles away you have to chose the City/Postcode option and enter either a zip code or a city name. Don’t be tempted to enter a zip code: the program will look only for streets in that zip.

Searching for Points Of Interest: Near Car and Near Cursor options will present a list of POIs at a reasonable distance (about 30 miles) with the ability to filter the results by name. The database is also reasonably large.

A search by Zip Code brings up POIs in the relevant Zip only, plus some stuff from far away. Definitely a bug in the search algorithm. A search by City brings up approximately the same results as Near Car. This may be useful if you want to search for POIs in a place where you are going. Another option is looking at All Cities. This offers the choice of the three major US maps: East, Central and West.

Destination searches can also be done by Coordinates (if you know the exact position in Longitude and Latitude) or by Photograph. The Photograph option may be useful for choosing a destination by its photo – assuming you took a photo of something and it has coordinates attached to it.

The normal choices of Recent finds and Favorites are also available.

A strangeness in the route menu: PolNav can demo a route (drive it), but only if the route has a via point. If the route is between point A and point B it can’t be demoed. Only if a via point is added, will the route be demoed between the via point and the rest of the route.

Conclusion: unless you can get PolNav at a low price it is not worth bothering with. There are a number of much better alternatives, iGO8 (or even Amigo) and Destinator come to mind. PolNav seems like a worthy competitor to GarminXT. With the addition of TTS PolNav would be a much more attractive proposition.