palmOne GPS Solution Zire 72 Edition - palmOne GPS Solution Zire 72 Edition

As if this wasn’t enough I found it very difficult to actually plan a route if the Zire wasn’t actively connected to the Bluetooth device. Unless you turn off the Live GPS option, buried in a menu in the software, it will constantly bring up a dialogue box asking you to connect to a Bluetooth device. If you then turn off Bluetooth in the Zire, Mapsonic then bugs you every few seconds by asking if you want to turn Bluetooth on. The solution is to select any port but Bluetooth in the set-up, as well as turning off GPS, but until I discovered this I was so bombarded with dialogue boxes, I was ready to chuck the Zire into a ditch. Once I finally managed to enter an addresses and plan a route, I was then appalled at how long the calculation took. The fact that the 200MHz processor in the Tom Tom Go can work out routes far quicker than the 312MHz XScale in the Zire 72, speaks volumes about software optimisation.

Once on the road, the Mapsonic software did at least do a job and direct me on the planned route. If I deviated from the planned route, the Zire recalculated quickly and with the decent screen and graphics the Mapsonic software should have been reasonable to use. However, it was severely let down by the volume of the voice instructions, which was barely audible, even with the Zire set to maximum volume and the car radio switched off. If the car radio is on, you’d have trouble hearing any instructions at all. I tried to improve things and discovered a volume slider within Mapsonic itself. This is set to medium by default and it quickly became clear why as soon as I raised it higher the speaker on the Zire distorts horribly. This contrasts sharply with the Tom Tom Go and Mio 168, both of which delivered their instructions loud and clear. To add insult to injury I found some of the routes the Mapsonic software chose were quite odd, taking me a long way round when other routes would have been more logical.

One feature the Mapsonic software does have is a selection of built-in Points of Interest. You can also download ones specific ones from the ViaMichelin web site, such as the Michelin Guide to Great Britain, which enables you to locate almost 6,900 hotels and restaurants located throughout Great Britain. However, I think if you could more easily enter the address you wouldn’t need to spend 39 Euros to make up for the software shortcomings.

When all said and done, the Zire bundle can fulfil its primary function and get you from A-B with voice guidance. However, other products I’ve looked at do so far, far better than this. The Zire 72 GPS bundle may look like a neat on-box solution on paper, but in practice it’s under-featured and very frustrating to use.

Verdict

The Kirrio cradle and Bluetooth reciever are decent enough pieces of hardware but the bundle as a whole is severaly let down by the ViaMichelin Mapsonic software. It's shortcomings might have been forgivable a couple of years ago, but compared to current competition it’s extremely dissapointing. It does the otherwise decent Zire 72 PDA no favours and as a GPS bundle I can only recommend avoiding it. The Tom Tom GO is a far superior GPS device. For those who want a PDA as well, the Pocket PC based Mio 168 is a good choice, while for those set on a Palm OS based device you’d do well to consider the Garmin iQue or a Tungsten T3 with Tom Tom Navigator 3 instead.