November 9, 2005

Cobra NavOne 4500 GPS arrives for Review at the GPS Lodge

The Cobra NavOne 4500 car GPS arrived for review at the GPS Lodge, and wow is this BIG. It is strikingly huge with its bright 5" screen and is heavy look and feel. The design is somewhat retro with its chrome trim and its sharper defined edges. Kindof cool. I took it for a few tours around town briefly and the featureset is very big also; I feel pampered with the self dimming screen, the voice navigation that warns me with plenty of notice, and then gives a visual countdown to the turn with a little bar chart over on the side of the screen (with so much screen real estate you can afford to do this).

(See our announcement of the Cobra NavOne 4500)

The unit comes with the FM receiver that plugs in the back to pull down traffic information. I'll be looking forward to avoiding some traffic myself in my daily commuting around Boston, MA. Cobra is using the Clear Channel's Total Traffic Network system that broadcasts traffic updates over the FM band to the GPS receiver. The data is taken in and incorporated into the GPS routing so that you navigate A-R-O-U-N-D traffic instead of through it.

(See potential improvements coming along for the Cobra NavOne 4500 traffic feeds. Soon there may be Predictive Traffic information available due to a Clear Channel and Inrix agreement.)

With the higher price tag, you'd expect higher functionality. This unit is certainly stacked, and we'll be testing out as many of the functions we can find over the coming weeks. Check back to see our full review when we are done.

Some of the Cobra NavOne 4500 Features:

- A HUGE 5 inch touch screen that is very bright, with automatic brightness control for easy viewing in the daylight and at night.
- Tele Atlas maps.
Personalized route options on the pre-loaded North American maps. Like most units you get to choose what types of roads you want to go on..... highway, primary roads, etc.
- A whopping 7.6 Million Points of Interest categorized into 9 general categories and then around 200 sub-categories. This could be really useful or really annoying if you need to drive down a couple levels every time you want a gas station.
- Addressbook - Store and then route to up to 1,000 addresses in the unit.
- Multi-point routing - add several addresses you need to go to, and then let it route you to each one of them in sequence.
- If you want to keep the Traffic feed service, it costs $59.95 per year after the first year.