"From the Manufacturer (June 19, 2008)"
Designed for portability, the Pharos Drive GPS 150 offers just the right balance of power, portability and price for newcomers to GPS receivers. Measuring less than an inch thin and under 4 inches wide, the compact Drive GPS 150 is great for driving with the included car mount and it can be easily slipped into a purse, briefcase, or backpack for usage while on foot.
The Pharos Drive GPS 150 in black. |
The Drive GPS 150 features a 3.5-inch color screen, quick route calculation, and turn-by-turn directions with voice prompts. It comes with everything needed to use the unit, including both car and AC power cords and a 1 GB Secure Digital (SD) memory card that's pre-loaded with street level maps of the United States. This model comes in black, but it's also available in pink and blue.
The Drive GPS 150's intuitive navigation software offers text-to-speech functionality that guides you with turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions. If you miss a turn along the route, the Drive GPS 150 automatically recalculates a route and gets you back on track, pronouncing the names of the streets along the way. If you're on foot, the Drive GPS 150 provides a pedestrian mode that plots routes with pedestrian options and preferences in mind.
The Drive GPS measures less than 1 inch thin and weighs 6.4 ounces (black model shown). |
The 3.5-inch color LCD clearly indicates your route. |
The highly sensitive, 20-channel SiRFStarIII GPS receiver provides a rapid time-to-first-fix positioning and can acquire a signal even in urban canyons and under dense foliage. It's matched with a 32-bit CPU processor for quick recalculation of your route should you get off the original course.
The 3.5-inch color touchscreen LCD has a 320 x 240-pixel resolution and a color depth of 16.7 million colors for a clear display of the preloaded U.S. street level maps and navigation routing. You can choose to see a two-dimensional or three-dimensional map adjusted specifically for day time or night time conditions. When you begin a selected journey, the Drive GPS 150 provides an overview of your complete route, the total driving distance to your destination, the estimated travel time, and the complete destination address. If you don't have a street address, you can simply navigate to a point on the map by manipulating the touchscreen and selecting it as your destination--the Drive GPS 150 will then calculate your route.
The Drive GPS 150 also comes with a Points of Interest (POI) list that collects thousands of interesting or useful places organized by easy-to-find categories, from shopping centers to restaurants to gas stations. And many of the categories have subcategories to help narrow the choices--for example, under gas stations you'll find names of particular brands.
Other features include:
- Save favorite addresses and points of interest to the Address Book
- Your most recent 64 locations are saved in the Recent Places menu for easy access
- Specify certain types of roads that you want to exclude from route calculations
- Internal speaker with 3.5mm stereo earphone jack
- Mini USB connector
- 1200 mAh rechargeable lithium-polymer batter with 5 to 7 hours of continuous operation; 4-hour recharging tiem
- Dimensions: 3.94 x 3.31 x 0.95 inches (WxHxD)
- Weight: 6.4 ounces
What's in the Box
Pharos 150 GPS device, 1 GB SD memory card, USB cable, car mount, car charger, AC adapter, travel bag, printed quick-start guide, CD with manual
Customer Reviews
A good budget unit
This is a good budget GPS. I used it to discover a couple of short cuts to work already. I modified it to support calculator, notepad, photo viewer, word/excel/ppt/pdf viewers, and mp3/video players, etc. in additional to the Destinator GPS program (Thanks daniel53 and others). It's a very nice toy especially for tech-savvy users (5 stars for being able to modify it).
The user interface may not be super intuitive as some high-priced units.
BTW, make sure to try the "avoid roads" feature under the "Manage Route." You can create one or more sets of roads to avoid (or not to avoid).
If Pharos can provide free map updates, as the previous reviewer mentioned, then I'll give it a 6-star rating. :-)
Good enough for me :)
I must admit I had my reservations purchasing this item, as the Pharos brand is not as well known as some of the others, and I could only find few comprehensive reviews on the unit. However, I simply could not argue with all the features that were being offered for such a low price... so I took the chance, and I am glad that I did. The performance was peppy, LCD was bright and easy to read, text-to-speech was clear, GPS tracking functioned smoothly as expected, the interface was reasonable intuitive. The point of interest and the maps seemed a little outdated, but the customer support told me that a new version should be available early next year on their website, free of charge.
All in all, although it may lack the "sophistication" in build/software quality of the bigger companies, I'm very happy with my purchase.
Good for the price.
I like simple but powerful devices -- as this one. I really have nothing to complain if this one uses some different operation styles from other GPSs. Get used to its own style and you will find it easy to use. The only true shortcomings I have found -- some simple functions that it really should have -- are:
1. no way to know how much power is left in the battery.
2. no way to adjust the time & date.
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