Pharos EZ Road Pocket GPS Navigator

Well-known in Bluetooth and PDA GPS circles, Pharos now offers an all-in-one navigation device called the EZ Road Pocket GPS Navigator. The size of a Pocket PC with a flip-up GPS antenna on its back and a bundled window/AC vent mount, the EZ Road uses Microsoft's ActiveSync, three CDs of U.S. map data, and its own Ostia Navigator interface. While the device offers a lot of features for a surprisingly low $549, a few notable weaknesses prevent us from recommending it.

Ostia remains one of the better handheld GPS interfaces. Entering origin and destination points from an address, intersection, or one of the points of interest is pretty intuitive. Any of these can be saved as a favorite or set as a default home location. Setting point-to-point or multipoint routes is a cinch. Route options include Fastest, Shortest, and No Highways and you can reverse route instructions in two taps.

The default route view shows the usual swatch of street map with you (indicated with a triangle) near the center. With two quick touches, you can switch into views that spotlight the upcoming turn or show this view and the map view displayed side by side, although this gets a bit cramped on a 320 x 240 screen. Pharos' voice prompts are clear and effective, with a spoken warning about a quarter of a mile before the turn and a chime warning roughly 250 feet before the turn.

From there, the EZ Road went a bit south. The map information failed to show data for a housing development whose roads are roughly two years old. Pharos told us that if customers register their product after purchase it will provide free updated region maps for download (up to three a day), although there were none available during our review. We charted a path to the local library (a point of interest), located in a strip mall, and were instructed to make a U-turn into the mall rather than the correct left turn. Admittedly, this is more the map data provider's fault than Pharos'.

The POIs you want, businesses such as restaurants and hotels, are available only through the subscription-based SmartFinder plug-in database. SmartFinder runs $44 a year, but you can get three months for $12 or one month for $5. A subscription gets you regular POI updates, but you can just get one month's data on your hard drive, cancel your subscription, and keep the data to use from then on.

The device's home screen offers icons for calendar, contacts, and an MP3 player. The MP3 player (which won't play WMA files on the largely Microsoft-based device) is little more than a glorified player UI with a playlist and some EQ presets. Drop MP3s into the EZ Road's ActiveSync file folder on your desktop and the files show up in the device's internal My Documents folder as empty files. You must instead manually drop them into the My Documents folder on your SD card. (Pharos includes a 128MB card.) Calendar and contacts must all be entered manually on the device(quite a feat with the tiny onscreen keyboard)rather than using the bundled ActiveSync to pull over Outlook data. In an effort to simplify Microsoft's software, Pharos essentially crippled it.

Satellite acquisition time often ran in excess of 15 seconds for us, which is quite slow, and we experienced several occasions where the device's performance became sporadic because the device kept having to reacquire satellites, even outdoors on a clear day. Another major problem for us was the power cable requirement. Pharos includes a USB-to-AC-style power adapter, as well as a DC-to-USB converter. You must use one or both of these to charge the long-running internal battery, because the device cannot trickle-charge from a USB data cable. This arrangement requires mobile users to carry two cables instead of one and can consume two USB ports on your PC.

At $549, the EZ Road is a lot more affordable than most competing standalone GPS units, but probably won't beat out a far more functional GPS-enabled Pocket PC, such as Navman's PiN. The Ostia interface is good, but not that good. While the Pharos EZ Road does its core job reasonably well, it feels underdeveloped compared to the competition.