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Author : Jake Richards
Vendor : Garmin
Price : $749.88 Suggested Retail, $699.99 online at Garmin’s web site.
Rating ( 5 out of 5) :

Garmin has for years had a PDA/GPS combination based on the Palm operating system. Now they have entered the Windows Mobile arena with three units, the M3, M4 and M5 PDA. This review covers the middle model, the M4.

The M4 is a good design, with a solid function as a Windows Mobile PDA, but also works well as an integrated GPS using the Garmin City Navigator North America NT software preinstalled and all maps already installed. Out of the box, this device is GPS ready! This image shows the M5 model, but all three are essentially the same size and shape, with the differences being in speed, maps installed and the availability of Bluetooth.

What do you get with the M4?

Garmin has been in the navigation business for a long time, and the software maturity shows it. The user interface is easy to understand, and the map displays are beautiful. Here are some screen shots:

This the first screen you get when the antenna is flipped up. Pretty straightforward–either tell it where you want to go, or just view the map to see where you are.

I’m not going to show every options, but you can see from these two screens that you can customize the software in a lot of ways to make it suit your needs. Changing one of these options is as simple as tapping the current setting and either watch it toggle from one to another, or pick you choice from a list. There are lots and lots of options to set!

When you are ready to navigate, you can manage all of your data from this screen:

You can store your own locations, save and restore routes, manage your tracks of previous trips, navigate to your contacts list, choose the map you want and even add custom POI datasets. The Tracks of your previous trips can be displayed on the map, if you’d like, or hidden from view. Once you decide where to go, the route is quickly planned and you get crisp clear directions from the screen and clear guidance in a great voice. Here are the day and night screens showing a route planned:

As you can see, the screen shows your speed, altitude, time to go to the next turn and time of ETA across the top of the screen. The directed route is shown in a high visibility magenta color that works for both day and night. What you cannot see from the screen shots is that the Garmin has an option in the overall operating system to have a different screen brightness setting for day and night, so when the screen flips from day to night, not only does the software change, the screen brightness also shifts. That combination makes for a very easy transition from day to night. The screen also shows you where you are and where the next turn will take you. In this case, you are on Heatherford Court and the next turn will take you onto Heatherford Place. The dpad button zooms in and out so that you can choose the scale you want. I found the 800ft scale to be good for me, combining a good detail with a pretty good "look ahead" distance.

If you just want to follow your location, you can do that. The screen changes slightly:

As you can see, in the GPS following mode, you get information on the direction you are heading (099), your speed (0 mph) and your general location (Centreville, VA). You also get the status of your fix. On the bottom of the screen, the two icons are an arrow that will take you to the menu screens and a speaker icon that will force the system to repeat the current verbal directions. You also get an arrow showing where North is and icons for any POI that happen to be nearby. Just below the scale bar you will be able to see if the map has full detail or is at a summary level. As you zoom out to show more area, the details are automatically suppressed.

In operation the system is easy to use and the directions are clearly spoken and displayed. The Sirf GPS receiver is very sensitive, and is WAAS enabled. It consistently got the first fix in a few seconds. WAAS was nice, but isn’t really required for road navigation.

There were a couple of problems. The main one was that the City Navigator software would "crash out" to the Today screen and the GPS would be displayed as "off" with no input from the user. I couldn’t figure out what caused the problem, as it wasn’t that consistent. It also didn’t happen that often (only three times in three weeks of testing), so it was difficult to see what was the common element in the failures. The good news in this failure was that if you tapped the GPS bar on the today screen the GPS would immediately restart and the City Navigation software would resume exactly where you were, with your route still in place, the directions still in place and as soon as the GPS got a fix (a couple of seconds) you got solid tracking again. Other than being unpredictable and having to tap the GPS bar to get it going again, this problem was more of an annoyance than a fatal flaw, although it would be nice if Garmin could fix the problem. I did look at the Garmin website for any update, and did a search of the web, but found nothing. Maybe Garmin will find the cause and update the software.

As a PDA, the Garmin was good, but not great. The speed of the processor is not the highest you can buy today, although the M5 does increase to 412 MHz for the main processor and adds a coprocessor dedicated to the GPS function. Those improvements should make the M5 a bit snappier in operations. The PDA came with the standard suite of Microsoft products, including contacts, PIE, Pocket Word and Excel, Media Player and others. I did install some software to do the screen captures and file explorer. Installation went well, and the software worked perfectly. I didn’t install a lot of stuff, and none of them were Today plug ins, but the system seemed to work well.

There is an SD slot for additional storage capacity. The screen has a flip-up screen cover that protected the screen in normal use. When you need to use the PDA, you flip the screen down and behind the PDA to expose the screen. To use the cradle, you flip the screen cover behind and it all fits perfectly. The fit and function was excellent, and the quality of manufacture was typical Garmin excellence. Battery life was pretty good at 5-6 hours.

Conclusion
Cost of this unit may seem high, but consider that for the price you get a PDA, a GPS receiver, Navigation software, windshield mount, and a car power supply. Compare that singly cost to the cost of buying those parts separately and the Garmin M-series is a great way to go!

PROS

• Great Garmin Maps
• Great Garmin User interface and displays
• Integrated Sirf Receiver
• Quality construction
• All-in-one GPS Navigation solution
  

CONS

• Occasional "crash out" to the Today screen
• Not the fastest WM2003SE PDA available
  

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Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.