“Do you want to use a GPS navigation system?†asked Banwari. I hadn’t used one earlier, and I was going to an unfamiliar place in a different city, so I agreed to take along the MapmyIndia Navigator. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t know where he’s going on a road trip, you’ll need more than a map. You can always ask the locals for directions, but in a country where every few hundred kilometers brings a new language your way, making yourself understood can be quite a daunting task. Even if you do speak the local language, everything is usually ‘ten minutes away’, so you never have a proper idea of the distance. That’s where a car navigation system like the MapmyIndia “Fortuna 430 Classic†GPS Navigator is handy – you don’t have to stop to ask for directions, you know exactly how far you have to go in terms of kilometers and places along the route are also displayed on the screen.
The device that Banwari handed over had a big touch screen that could be mounted with a suction cup onto the windscreen, and the course could be plotted via an easy-to-understand search .I was informed that MapmyIndia provides coverage of over 400 cities and over a million point of interests. I found the maps and the places of interests highly accurate. You can also choose the way you want to get there: the shortest route, or the quickest. They’re not always the same, and the device can show you your options. You could save your routes , plan trips or for that matter even listen to music , watch videos and do a lot more on the MapmyIndia navigator.
I was quite pleased by the graphics of the screen – they’re clear, and the audible instructions help. The buttons on the screen are intuitive to use, and although a stylus is provided, there isn’t any obvious place to keep it with the screen itself. We did run into a bit of a bother while trying to return from Pune, where the female voice insisted we turn away from Mumbai, instead of towards, but otherwise it was smooth sailing all the way. Just feed in your destination, let the device compute it and follow its instructions. What’s more, the device showed us our actual speed, so if you’ve got a driver and you want to keep an eye on his speed, this device can be useful. The maps are updated every six months, so it’s a simple matter of changing the SD card on the device.
I do a lot of driving to places I’ve never been before in my job, and the MapmyIndia navigator made it so easy for me, what with points of interest like restaurants and petrol pumps also programmed into it. I was sorry to see it go back – but now it’s back to asking for directions, and hoping that my destination really is ten minutes away.
Technical details of the device we used:
Model Name: MapmyIndia Fortuna 430 Classic
Features: 4.3-inch touch-screen display, trip planning, saving routes as favourites, huge list of places of interest and maps covering over 400 Indian cities.
