Sony's Nav-U94T Portable GPS

Nov. 28, 2008 — -- New Jersey was designed, it seems, as a testing ground for Global Positioning System devices.

Its roads are snarled as if they were designed by a team of drunken blind guys. And befuddled engineers were allowed only a handful of words to name those roads, so the streets in each town are limited to Springfield, Valley, Prospect and a few tree names. Sometimes they even intersect each other.

And a wrong turn on New Jersey's tangle of highways often means flying off in the wrong direction at 70 mph with the next exit 10 miles away. And that can turn out to be yet another highway that does not take you back the way you came.

That's why Jersey drivers are sometimes spotted screaming and banging their heads on their steering wheels.

So it was with a mix of glee and gotcha that I attached the Sony Nav-U94T onto my dashboard and plugged the cord into my car's power outlet while parked in my Jersey driveway.

Ten minutes later, its female voice was giving me directions as if it had grown up in Jersey, only without the accent. Actually, it has its own Inspector Clouseau-like accent that turns town names like Maplewood into Mopplewood.

The Nav-U took me on a series of errands without error, although, at times, turns came up so quickly in the Casbah of Jersey streets that it would tell me to turn left too late to make the left. I followed its directions home from one weekend haunt and it took me a way that I never knew existed. It was longer than my usual route, but it was a nice change of pace.

The Nav-U navigated flawlessly if I punched in a specific address, asked it to find an intersection or simply had it search for the location of a mall. Along the way, the map displayed gas stations that were ahead, although you could also ask it to find a gas station. And when I veered off the recommended route, it smoothly recalculated without any choppiness in the mapping or in the digital voice.

The Nav-U has handy extras. It can display the map as well as a 3-D image of an approaching intersection to help navigate confusing splits or cross-overs.

Nav-U Has Its Glitches

Not having a GPS built into the car is messy, however. Once the device is on the dashboard, a power wire floats down to the outlet. In addition, the Nav-U's antenna is snaked up to the windshield and then along it as neatly as possible. No matter how you do it, two long wires dangle annoyingly in view.

It is a durable machine, which is essential since the sunction cup that is supposed to hold it on the dashboard or windshield doesn't hold very well. It repeatedly spilled off my dash and onto the floor, a startling thing to happen while in the middle of a turn. Then there's the need to fish around on the floor to find it again and replace it.

At $399.99, the Nav-U is one of the more expensive mobile GPS devices. The Nav-U brags that it can do a lot of things, like turn your cell phone into a hands-free phone with its Bluetooth connection. That was something my teenage digital genius could not figure out how to do. And if he can't do it, someone like me has no hope. He worked at it for 30 minutes before giving up. The Nav-U was too difficult to get a connection working and the device did not say what was wrong with the connection when an error occurred.

Other doodads on the Nav-U I didn't even try: its ability to play videos or to display photos. Huh? This from a device that warns drivers not to continuously look at the GPS mapping system while driving because it is dangerous and can cause accidents. It sounded to me like suicide by GPS.