Review on Palm GPS Car Kit 3224NA by Stacy Hahn

I've been using the Palm GPS Car Kit with my T5 for about 6 days now. It works well alongside the T5 and despite some minor quirks and glitches I give it a 5 star rating. Part of that is because I'm easily amused by cool tech that works, and Palm's car GPS kit definitely ticks that box in my opinion. The other part (5 stars despite some quirks) is that even at the Palm's current price of $179 (sold a lot cheaper elsewhere) this thing is *steal*. Your windshield so it can be rotated and pivoted to any position you want to get the best view and minimize glare during the day.- Cradle's GPS signal reception is wonderful. The car kit comes with an external antenna, but I didn't need it, despite driving through several heavily wooded roads on my way to work. This includes changing routes if you want to take a different route, showing traffic information when using this component, changing the volume, screen colors, destination (if programmed as favorites or when using points of interest) and more. . . If you are changing a destination that requires you to enter a specific location or address, you must exit the road to do so. While you can still do this with the touch of a finger, it requires more precision and attention, and you'll *get* off the road or have an accident if you attempt this while driving. On-screen information is clear and easy to read, even on the small Palm screens. There's a lot of information (which you can turn on or off) including speed, time to destination, miles to destination, direction you're driving (like compass), upcoming turns by distance, direction and name of the next road a curve, it simply and quickly directs you to the next path back to your original route. - It gives you many options to set route including shortest, fastest, no highway, toll avoidance and more. If you don't like the route shown, you can ask them to recalculate the route and give you the option to avoid certain parts of that route. The included TomTom maps seem pretty darn modern to me, although others have noticed some flaws. Many, many places are listed in the points of interest databases, especially many hotel locations. Note, however, that they are more detailed on US state or region maps than on large street and city maps. You can plan your trip offline (pre-planning), similar to how Mapquest works. City, street and addresses (or use points of interest or just "city to city") as start and end points, and it calculates your route by showing kilometers and time. Did I mention this is a great deal? Cons: - Intermittently hangs in your palm. This happened after I received a traffic alert through the bluetooth phone. (You must first register with an email address and password on the TomTom website, then you can use Palm to activate a free 30-day trial of the TomTom Plus Traffic service.) I don't know if this is the case yet will be an ongoing problem. Hangups are quickly fixed with a soft reset. After the restart, turn off your Palm, plug it back into the base station, turn it on again and you're good to go. You cannot navigate across multiple maps or plan trips. Even if you have more than one map installed, the software will only work with the currently "downloaded" map and you will only have one map loaded at a time. If you need to navigate or plan a trip that covers more than one map (e.g. nationwide), you need to use a major road and city map. It works well, but it doesn't have the same level of detail (i.e. smaller streets and addresses, much smaller POIs) as state or regional maps. The maps are large so you really need 1GB to install multiple US regional maps. Maps, although this is by no means required. The size of regional maps is usually 140-170 MB. The map of major American roads and cities weighs about 220 MB. The individual state maps are much smaller, but it's *much* more functional to put multiple US regional maps on an SD card. The accompanying documentation is rather incomplete. On the hardware side, all you really get from Palm is a fold-out setup sheet. The TomTom software manual on the disc isn't bad, but it's not great. TomTom's support site is also "good" but not great. All in all, the Palm GPS Car Kit is functional, flexible and a lot of fun for those who, like me, are easily entertained.