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Developer/Vendor: Hewlett Packard (Hewlett Packard)
Price: $449.99 (MSRP)
Rating (3 out of 5):

I watched Chris unbox the HP 310 Travel Companion here. I’m not going to add a lot of screenshots of the system in this review, for two reasons: 1) it doesn’t have the ability to take screenshots natively and you cannot install any third party software to do so, and 2) it doesn’t follow any standard for connecting to a PC, so you cannot use any of the third party remote desktop software to capture the screen. Chris’ video shows the screen resolution and most of the menus, so I encourage you to watch the unboxing.

I really wanted to like this device. And when I first powered it up, I was really impressed. The screen is big, bright and very smooth. The unit itself is a sleek, good looking device, and the window mount is sturdy. I figured it all would look really nice in my car. It does look nice, but unfortunately, the performance of it as a navigation system doesn’t match the good looks.

Testing Environment

I tested the unit in my car, in my basement and in various locations in Northern Virginia.

What you get

Chris’ video shows what is in the box. You get:

• The HP 310, with stylus and a slip case
• Power cord (USB to mini-USB)
• Power adapter for car
• Power unit for wall
• Windshield mount (suction cup)
• Disk for dashboard mounting
• Manuals (warranty) and a CDROM disk

Technical Specifications

According to the HP website, the tech specs are:

• Integrated wireless - Integrated GPS navigation, Integrated Bluetooth v2.0 with EDR
• Processor – Centrality Titan 600MHz
• Operating system – Windows CE 5.0 with custom HP user interface
• Display –   4.3″ transmissive TFT 16-bit RGB depth 65,000 color WVGA 800 x 480 pixel touch screen display, antiglare, landscape orientation
• Memory – 128MB SDRAM main memory for running applications (may vary by country) Up to 2 GB Flash ROM (depending on model/may vary by country) User available persistent storage varies by model
• Weight – 187 g (6.60 oz) with battery
• Battery – 1700 mAh Lithium Ion rechargeable, user changeable battery
• Expansion – High-capacity SD card slot
• Audio – Large speaker for navigation volume, integrated microphone with echo cancellation, 3.5mm 3 pin headphone jack
• Included accessories – Windshield mount with device holder, dashboard mount disc, car charger, standard battery, AC charger, mini-USB cable, carrying case
• Dimensions – 86.8mm x 110.2mm x 18.2mm (3.4 x 4.3 x 0.7 in)

Using the HP 310

Here is a picture of the unit with my Axim X50v, both with navigation software running.

As you can see, the screen of the HP310 is bigger and the resolution of 800X480 makes that screen very smooth, with no jaggies visible at all. It scrolls very smoothly. The built-in non-glare surface makes it very readable, even in bright sunlight. My Axim has a non-reflective screen protector and is, in this picture, running at a high backlight level. The HP310 has a setting to change brightness from day to night, but none to change brightness when on battery or external power. This picture shows the daytime color scheme. Chris’ unboxing shows the night scheme, with blue roads on a black background. With a minimum brightness setting for night, and with the black background, the HP310 is not distracting at night, but bright enough to make use very easy.

The software in the HP310 is based on the system from Nav’n’Go, a company that also sells the same software as OnCourseNavigator6 (link), iGo and the Mio systems (link). The system uses TeleAtlas maps, which have some issues in my area, but the issues are easy to work around given I know of them. In your particular area, if you have map problems with TomTom or any other TeleAtlas based system, you’ll have the same issues with the HP 310.

Navigation begins by tapping on the little house icon in the bottom right. From there you are taken to the main screen, and from there you can select your destination, via points and tell the system to commence the calculations. Route planning is quick. You can display the entire route and look at the itinerary. You can also decide to keep a trip log, if you want, that can later be exported to a .gpx file on an SD card. You can also designate how you want the route to be calculated. You can choose a route for a car, taxi, bus, truck or bicycle. You can choose a fast, short or economical route. And you can turn on or off the automatic recalculation. You can also tell the system to display your position always on a road (snap-to-road) or not. You can tell it to avoid unpaved roads, ferries, cross-border planning, permit-only and toll roads. The options screen has Highways unselected and U-turns selected but both are greyed out and unchangeable. That situation says it will not avoid highways and will avoid U-turns.

In the sound options it has the typical options for volume, but it also has a Dynamic Volume on/off and minimum speed/maximum speed setting. Apparently this function will increase the volume based on the measured speed, compensating for the increased background noise from that higher speed travel. In practice, I didn’t see any difference. The system will issue warnings when you approach POIs designated as “safety cameras.” You can turn this function off, if you wish. The US maps don’t have safety camera information, but if you know of one in your area, you can enter the data on a special screen just for those POI. Of course, that doesn’t help you in strange locations, and if you know where the camera is, you don’t need the warning, but I guess there is some benefit there somewhere.

Regional settings allow you to choose the language, voice and units used in the display. You can also choose whether to update the clock from the GPS signal or not, and chose the time format (12-24 hours).

The system lets you chose languages and voices. I chose American Female, which resulted in a very pleasant voice. The text-to-speech function allows the HP 310 to annunciate street names, so the voice prompting says things like, “Turn left in 400 feet onto Heatherford Place” instead of just “turn left in 400 feet.” Hearing the street name is helpful, particularly in unfamiliar territory.

You can choose your destination from your contacts list, by

• touching the map,
• entering coordinates,
• selecting a POI,
• entering an address,
• picking from recent destinations or via points (history).

The system has capability for TMC, if you have a TMC receiver, but I don’t and there is no TMC in my area, so I couldn’t test that. You can also download a planned map from the HP website.

What worked

What worked well was that the screen is bright, clear and responsive. The voice was understandable, clearly pronouncing each word. It even properly pronounced the name of my street, an accomplishment that no other Text-to-speech system has been able to claim! Menus were finger-friendly and I never had to resort to the stylus. Re-routing was swiftly done and the system seemed to work well finding a new route. I also was able to register the package, get to the HP IPAQ Navigate website and download a system update. It had the option to download maps, but it said my maps were up-to-date, so I didn’t use that function. After the software update, the system soft-reset automatically.

The mount holds the unit firmly when it is stuck to the glass (but see what didn’t work about the mount below) and it was very easy to adjust the screen to an optimum position. The system comes with a suction cup disk that can be glued to your dashboard if you live in a location that prohibits anything from being stuck to the windshield itself. The arm on the holder is short and very rigid and it held the unit without vibration at all.

What didn’t work

The sad part of this device is that although it is beautiful looking, it is severely crippled in functionality compared to the other GPS options using the Nav’n’Go software. Apparently HP wanted to make it easier to use, so they took out most of the many options that Nav’n’Go has in the system, leaving the HP 310 with confusing and inadequate Settings and options. For example, look at the picture of the HP 310 with my Axim X50v. The screen of the 310 is larger, almost as large as the entire X50v, but the amount of map you can see from top to bottom is actually smaller on the 310 than on the X50v. One of the reasons for that difference is that on the 310, the zoom options are limited to Smart Zoom on or off, Restore lock-to-position on or off and Zoom in after find, on or off and that’s all. On the X50v, running OCN6, I can select the parameters for Smart Zoom, including the zoom in and out limits. By tweaking those two variables, I was able to get a setting that gives me more visibility further down the road by making it appear I was “higher” over the road. So, on my X50v I can see Route 29 and Interstate 66, but on the 310, I can just see the red line that is 29 at the fringe of visibility. Another problem was that the HP only showed present location in the center of the screen, not at the bottom as in the original software. That means that half of the display is showing where you’ve been, and only half shows where you are going. That design added to the limits of visibility going forward on the 310. Finally, the upper and lower display bars on the 310 take up a lot of real estate. While the information there is useful, that’s a lot of space! On the X50v version, the same data is tucked on the sides and the upper/lower regions for display are transparent, so you can see the map underneath. Tapping the map brings up some buttons to zoom in/out and to opt for full screen map versus what you see in the picture. Zooming to full screen gives more map data, but then you don’t get the other information about destination time, speed, GPS status, etc. The buttons disappear very quickly, about 1-2 seconds, after tapping the screen so you really do need to concentrate on them when you use them. The jog wheel can also be used to change the zoom, volume and to select menu items, but it was awkward to use when the unit was in the mount.

The POI database was adequate, but it had all the typical problems: not showing locations, showing closed locations, showing inaccurate locations. Entering a contact you could only add the street, not the house number, since the software only navigates to streets and doesn’t tell you which side of the street your destination may be. Because you cannot enter a house number on the 310, when it tried to navigate to a contact point that was on a street longer than one block, it navigated to one end of the road. Given some roads are short, that’s close, but given some roads are very long, that’s bad. Basically, you cannot navigate to or from a contact entered on the HP 310. I can’t say about synchronized contacts, as I didn’t synchronize any into the 310, but given the fact that it doesn’t seem to store house numbers, I suspect you cannot use contacts for navigation, only for controlling your Bluetooth phone.

Now, I do have to say that my X50v is running Andy’s 8.1 skin from PDA Mill but even so, the 310 has a lot fewer options than the base Nav’n’Go software started with (see my review of OCN6 here to see what the 310 could have been). Because you cannot add any third party software, you cannot use any of the screen themes or skins that other Nav’n’Go users can get from that PDA Mill website. What you get with the HP 310 is a so-so navigation system, bundled with a ho-hum media player and Bluetooth phone manager with a beautiful case and screen.

The HP website also has severe limitations. I thought I’d start with a route I travel often—Fairfax, Virginia to Fort Mill, SC. If you want to plan a route there, you get this screen:

I didn’t want to go from Washington to Charlotte, but I couldn’t select Fort Mill, SC or Fairfax, VA as destination or start point. There are limited numbers of cities you can pick, and it doesn’t accept any street names at all. The system requires that you enter the date of the trip (I have no idea why they need that) and the duration of the trip (limited to 7 days, again I have no idea why) and only if it has ALL of that information will it plan. You can download the plan to the 310 by connecting the 310 to your PC and using the HP interface software on the CDROM to transfer the map. You cannot see the route itself on the HP website, and curiously, the maps it uses to show the endpoint of the route were GoogleMaps. After the experience, I wasn’t sure what the point of the website was at all. Not very useful and strangely built.

Speaking of the CDROM, that was a waste of time. All that is on it is the software to connect to HP’s website. You have to download everything from there to connect to the 310 from the PC. What you get is a crippled version of software to sync to the 310, but all it can do is transfer contacts from Outlook and the things you get from the HP website.

The battery is 1700 mAh, but it died on me after about 3 hours of use. It then took over 20 hours to re-charge, and at the end when I disconnected it from the charger it soft reset. In fact, the unit soft resets just about any time you do anything to it—charge it, connect it to the PC, sync contacts, etc. It even insisted on soft-resetting when I tried to charge it from my laptop. I had the 310 powered off, used the USB cable to get it charging (it had gone dead on my way to work, so it needed to be charged for the trip home) and after 9 hours on the charger, it only got to 50% full. When I disconnected the cable and powered on the 310 it did a full restart, even though no data had been flowing between the laptop and the 310.

The windshield mount failed to hold to the windshield more than a few hours at a time. I cleaned the window, cleaned the suction cup and tried to get it to the flattest spot on the glass, but it would only hold about 3 hours before letting go. I eventually just left the thing in the passenger seat of the car as it was more dangerous to have it installed and falling off in busy traffic.

Final thoughts
Many years ago I was going to a formal Navy ball to which a Playboy Playmate had been invited. She was escorted by a Lieutenant who was single, along with the usual entourage from Playboy magazine. My wife, along with the other wives at the ball, was unimpressed, but the males were all fascinated by her glamour. On Monday after the ball, I talked to her escort and asked, “How was it?” His answer has stuck with me for a long time, “She was,” he said, “a pretty face but an empty head. No conversation skill, no personality, no nothing. It was a really awful time.” That kind of describes the HP 310. It’s a beautiful but empty-headed device that performs only adequately.

Pros:

• Excellent screen (800 x 480 pixels)
• Quick routing/re-routing
• Typical POI database, customizable
• Pleasant voices

Cons:

• No third party software allowed
• Some errors in the TeleAtlas database (at least in my immediate area)
• Poor battery life, long charge times
• Awkward interface with minimal options to set the software
• Windshield mount wouldn’t hold to the glass

JakeRich (8 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Program Executive for a large international IT company. I've been using PDAs since the Casio Cassiopeia! Currently have an iPhone, HP211, Axim X51v, Axim X50v and an Axim X50. I was a navigator in A-6 Intruders in the Navy, became interested in GPS navigation a few years ago and now do reviews of GPS related products for Chris.