March/April 2005

Maintaining the constant downward pressure on prices for navigation systems, Thales' Magellan division has launched a smaller, self-contained variant of its RoadMate 700 system, using an SD card to hold its road mapping instead of a hard disk. The new RoadMate 300 is being marketed as an "out-of-the-box" solution, and is priced competitively at just £382 plus VAT.

The company has reduced the amount of memory needed for the mapping by supplying major road and motorway map data of all of Europe, supplemented by detailed Navteq mapping for major cities in the user's country and neighbouring regions. All this fits on to a 512MB SD card.

Features of the dedicated unit include a large, daylight-visible, colour touch screen, with moving map plus a 3-D graphic view showing one turn at a time; "QuickSpell" keyboard for fast address input; backlit keypad; integrated GPS antenna; and turn-by-turn text and voice-guided directions in seven languages.

Users can navigate to a destination selected from a personal address book, which can store up to 600 addresses (200 for each of the three different users, with customisable preferences for each).