Gadgetory

hey everybody this is Antoine Goodwin associate Iturbe car Tech and GPS at C net and I'm taking a look today at the Magellan smart GPS now this portable navigation device aims to bridge the gap between hardware that fits on your dashboard and the internet which is connected to your smartphone that should probably be staying in your pocket while you drive now the smart GPS is a five-inch screen device aside from the capacitive touch screen which is glass like you would get on a smartphone there's not very much different here from your standard GPS device it's basically a touch screen on a suction cup you've got your power on the top and a bunch of connections along the bottom here there's also an interesting little capacitive home button that you'll use to get back to the map screen from anywhere in the interface I kind of like that that's hardware in that software you'll see that they've devoted a large chunk of the screen to these live updating smart squares now you can show more of these squares by swiping this virtual jog wheel at the top - to the right or show fewer of them by swiping to the left you get four in the default state up to eight in the full screen and as few as zero when you're driving it also shrinks down to only show two so you get more map display you got everything from fuel prices to traffic flow data and incidents and live updating tiles with information about nearby points of interest pulled from Yelp and Foursquare when you flip out the full screen you've also got things like weather updates even an interesting little web browser here I don't know if you actually want to use that while you're driving but it can be good for finding destinations while you're parked now all of this information is going to be pulled from the internet via a Wi-Fi connection that's built in so when you pull into your driveway at the end of the day it'll start pulling that information so that it'll be ready when you get in the car the next time and want to go but if you have a web connected iPhone in your pocket you can also use that here we've got the Magellan smart GPS app running on an Apple iPhone this is an early alpha version that should pretty indicative of what you'll expect when the app actually hits the market this summer it does give you a little bit of interesting live data so if the traffic jam develops while you're on the road you got your data coverage right here the app can also be used for searching for destinations you've got the familiar Live Tiles here that the same ones that you'll see on the device itself and you also have the ability to search for destinations using the web connections once you've got a destination chosen you can either sync it to Magellan's cloud-based me cloud or my cloud service I'm not sure how to pronounce that but it'll actually be stored in the cloud that you can pull down later using smart GPS device or you can send that destination directly to the Magellan smart GPS Hardware over the Bluetooth connection for immediate navigation the interesting thing there is that you can start searching for a destination before you even get in your car or it's safe and then when you hop in their car you can already have it sitting there waiting to go when you're ready to drive now the last piece of the puzzle is Magellan online interface that lets you access all of that my cloud data from any web browser you can manage your favorites or add destinations to a wish list you can even organize those destinations into a multi stop trip and then optimize it so that you minimize the amount of driving that you've got to do the retail price of the Magellan smart GPS hardware is about $349 that's kind of pricey but the interesting thing is that they're tossing that my cloud cloud-based thinking in for absolutely free the Magellan smart GPS app is also free and that gives you some basic destination searching you can open that up into a much more useful navigation app with some in-app purchases you can check out the full review of the Magellan smart GPS over on cnet.com to see exactly how this thing works once you get on the road till then I'm Antoine Goodwin witzy Netcom and we've taken a look at the Magellan smart GPS web-connected portable you