Navman Smart GPS

Navman’s SmartGPS is a 5-inch Android tablet — running quite an old version of Android — that syncs over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi with your smartphone, giving you turn-by-turn driving directions and live traffic updates, as well as extra info like the cheapest petrol nearby and any cafes and restaurants in the area. But is it still worth buying a standalone GPS in 2014?

The $299 SmartGPS is based on a 5-inch Android tablet, and it’s functionally the same device as the Magellan SmartGPS released in the US. It’s a touchscreen device, running a forked version of Android — I think it might be based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread — with Navman’s bespoke GPS skin. It syncs over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi with your smartphone to pull across mobile data, giving you a personalised driving and location-finding experience.

The big hook of the SmartGPS is that it integrates with a few key services on your smartphone — Yelp and Foursquare in Australia, and Menumania in New Zealand. If you’re a big user of these apps already, you’ll see the advantage that Navman offers here over other GPS competitors; they have a great deal of info about places to see and places to eat in Australia’s capital cities.

To use the SmartGPS to its fullest, you can connect it to an existing or hotspot Wi-Fi network — like the one created by your smartphone — or you can use Bluetooth instead. With that sync, the SmartGPS regularly checks Yelp and Foursquare and gives you a streaming list of nearby cafes, restaurants and points of interest, in the same way that it handles regular location-finding and navigation

What Is It Good At?

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As a normal GPS, the Navman SmartGPS is perfectly adequate. Since it was designed for sending you from point A to point B, it does that quite well — you can input a destination by address or keyword or point of interest (petrol station, restaurant, shopping centre — this is where the Yelp and Foursquare tie-ins come into play), and select the shortest, fastest, or simplest route. You’re on your way with turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation — and the SmartGPS acquits itself admirably on that front. In my testing, it didn’t lose its GPS lock, didn’t get lost, and didn’t send me down any particularly circuitous routes.

Ignore its instructions, and the SmartGPS doesn’t go crazy — it quickly and quietly recalculates the route. The live-stream of nearby Yelp and Foursqure locations works well, too — I noted a few nearby locations on my test drives that I didn’t know were as close as they were. Yelp’s rating system tie-in also makes choosing a nearby restaurant or cafe a little easier. It’s all something that could be done on your smartphone, but the SmartGPS brings it all to one place.

The SmartGPS, when hooked up over Bluetooth, also functions as a handsfree speakerphone. The quality is not bad — far better than the microphone and speaker inside your smartphone, but not as good as using your car’s Bluetooth handsfree (if you have it). The speaker inside the SmartGPS can also be used to play music — there’s a microSD card slot and audio input — but it’s a little out of its league for that.

There’s a companion app for iOS and Android that can send data to your SmartGPS — you could set the destination on your iPhone if that’s where you’re comfortable typing, for example — and also give you directions on foot to your destination. It’s a bit unnecessary — Google and Apple Maps are already good enough — but if you want to buy into the entire Navman ecosystem, the app works perfectly well.