Review: Navigon 7310

On first impressions the 7310 seems no different to last year’s super slim 7210, but delving deeper into the interface reveals a range of extra features which certainly brings the Navigon range inline with the competition, but the question is do they work?

Indeed you’d certainly be hard pushed to find any major cosmetic differences between the 7210 and 7310, as the latter retains the same compact black profile and flush 4.3” display.

Further comparisons did reveal a slight reduction in the anti-glare coating – no doubt an attempt to make the screen sharper – but thankfully during driving it still managed to provide ample protection.

Delving into the interface provides an almost identical click and retract style interface, but there’s several subtle changes to be found if you look closer, for a start you can now navigate using GPS coordinates, locate parking zones along your route (though it seems to benefit larger cities and towns) or drive to POI simply by selecting them from the map.

Sadly Navigon didn’t feel it necessary to fix the issue of not being able to refine a full postcode search with a street or house number. But what they have provided is a brand new feature called MyRoutes, which may sound vaguely familiar to TomTom users.

MyRoute calculations take into consideration traffic, the time of day, day of the week and even your own individual driving style, before presenting you with a choice of three colour coded route paths, one ideal route (MyRoute) and two alternatives. You then get a chance to compare the routes by zooming into the map, viewing the ETA/distance to travel box-outs or running simulations.

In some ways MyRoutes is little more than an advanced route planner compared to TomTom’s offering and we can see people skipping it altogether if time is an issue, though we have to admit that some of the routes it picks were close to what we would choose ourselves.

However MyRoutes doesn’t quite gel with the original interface, for example picking a turn-by-turn list wont display the itinerary of alternative routes. If you disable MyRoutes – via the keyboard based input stage – you’ll find the option unavailable in the voice recognition system and when navigating purely by city the software will skip the MyRoutes selection process completely.

On a positive note Navigon have managed to expand the voice recognition technology so it can be used it to answer calls or control parts of the interface. In terms of recognising destinations we found it works pretty accurately as long as you learn to speak as naturally as possible (especially with numbers), but we found its performance hampered in areas with heavy background noise (e.g. Motorways).

Unfortunately controlling parts of the interface is counterproductive at times, because apart from when a call came in we still had to physically press the screen in order to activate the voice recognition in the first place.

Bluetooth handsfree was also hit and miss, whilst we could hear the recipient clearly they thought our voice was a little faint (even with max volume).

Text-to-speech seems to have been enhanced so it can speak traffic reports as well as working closer with the updated real-signpost pro system. Whilst it remains useful we did find the speech jumpy in places and in some ways not as effective, for example if you’re driving along major ‘A roads’ it will always announce the latter instead of the street name.

As for the traffic alerts these compared well against a live traffic website, but as with most RDS services performance varies depending on the station used, so in our real world tests we got a combination of both accurate and ghosting traffic alerts.

Initial route calculations were still relatively quick, but the map-redraw and route re-calculation speeds could be better, however when you see the new 3D view in action it’s a credit that it works as well as it does.

For a start the map can now display up to 412 POI categories, the colours have been adjusted with new subtle tones, roads with traffic warnings are highlighted, the 3D view incorporates a Panorama view (including street names) to give a better sense of the landscape and there’s even 3D buildings as well as landmarks in major cities. With all settings turned on it’s certainly a little overwhelming when heading towards a city, so throttling back on detail may be in order.

Finally you have the new MyReport service, which allows you to report any map or safety camera discrepancies and send the results back via Navigon Fresh (PC software), a feature that was certainly needed when we detected a couple of issues on the Q1 2009 maps!

In some ways the new major updates are a great addition to the 7310, but in other ways they are still lacking behind TomTom’s GO Live series.

Price (as reviewed): £299
Map coverage: Europe
Web: www.navigon.com

Overall verdict: 7/10

Words by Brett James.

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