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Traveling down in Raleigh, NC so I figured I would turn to the one device that has proven accurate any time I have ever traveled – the Neverlost GPS system from Hertz. Unfortunately Hertz was out of cars today so I had to rent from National. I reserved their answer to the Neverlost system and was surprised when they handed me a small Nextel device in a bag. To use it you suction-cup it to the windshield, press the green button twice, and a human comes on the phone asking you where you want to go. Huh? OK, I’ll play along. You tell the human where you want to go and they look up the route or address and push the route down to your phone.

From there the phone sort of works like the Neverlost by trying to talk you through the route and put arrows on the screen showing you which way to turn. If I had never used the Neverlost system I might not realize how bad this copy is. The screen’s backlight turns off so you can’t just look up and see what your next turn will be. It is slow. Numerous times it was telling me to make a turn when I was right on it. Not enough advance notice. It’s a guy’s voice. I like the female voice on the Neverlost.

But, once you can put all of that aside you want a device that will get you where you are going. This isn’t it. It had me turning all over the place. It told me to go east on a route and put it on the screen. Did I mention the screen is really small? So I made the turn it told me to and went east. It then decided to tell me I had gone off the route and it started recalculating. Terrible.

For the first time I really understand what they mean when they say “there’s Hertz, and there’s not exactly.”

That’s all for now. I need to go get directions off the Internet for my trip tomorrow because there is no way I am trusting that piece of junk anymore.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Technology, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.