Harman Kardon GPS-510 4-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator and Media Player Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Nice looking device, fits perfectly in hand. Touch screen is slick and very responsive... menus are easy to navigate and a home key is always present to take you back to beginning.

Charged it up and took it outside... was surprised when it locked on the instant i powered up... it had our spot on the map where it should be, so we started walking to end of street and the 510 tracked almost instantly when we were walking, as well as when we turned direction and headed back other way. Spent the next few days having it on in car and GPS function worked extremely well... never had any mistakes or weird routes (keep in mind only tested over a few days)... said names of streets clearly. Seemed to perform very well as GPS device.

Now for media player review:

OK, first of all -- the screen on it is very sharp and crisp... demo movies, and movies i loaded on to it, display very nicely. converted some dvd's to .avi or .xvid (cant remember which right now) and it played with no problems.

Anyway the biggest disappointment in the media department is that there are virtually no basic options/controls for mp3 or video playback. On videos there is absolutely no options to select from (zoom, full, etc.)... but they played well, so not a big deal.

MP3, however, is a different story. There is no "now playing" feature, nor the ability to create playlists from the player. (and of course no equalizer options or anything else.) So say you have a bunch of pop songs on the player and a bunch of classical and/or comedy tracks -- if you are in your car and you want it to shuffle through all of your pop songs there is no way to do that unless you have made a playlist on your pc comprised of only pop songs and have downloaded that playlist to the player. VERY restrictive. You can sort by artist/track/album in the player.... but you can't choose it to select more than one specific artist/track/album at a time. So if you want to listen on shuffle -- it's either shuffle through EVERY song on the player, or shuffle through one artists tracks. you can't specify more than one of any category to play through the player. Big bummer.

Add into all of that the fact that you are restricted to a max of 4GB of storage on an SD card -- so a couple of movies and you are going to have to buy another card if you want to carry around a lot of songs at the same time. Oh and no ability to view pictures either in case you wondered.

Summary: If you are looking at this as the perfect device to include mp3,video, gps -- i would pass. Personally the restrictions of the audio playback, along with no pics and 4 gb max just wouldn't cut it for me. I use my mp3 player (creative vision w) all the time in car, in house, etc. and need those basic mp3 controls. The extra price of the 510 for the media capabilities isn't justified IMO. For the same price of the unit ($400ish) i can get a nice gps only device and a solid media player (creative w for instance) with 30 - 60 gb of onboard storage.

Now if you aren't a big mp3/video user, then perhaps you would be satisfied with the limited media options as a trade off for the convenience of having it all in one package instead of having to carry around 2 units.

Hope this helps someone.

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Product Description:
GPS-510 Harman Kardon Portable Navigation+Traffic+Audio+Video device offers a highly intuitive user interface making it an easy to use navigation device. It features Text-to-Speech in English. It also offers full playback capability of digital music and video files. All access and control is via a high resolution 4" WQVGA touchscreen.In navigation mode, it offers easy-to-understand spoken instructions and visuals in 17 different languages. Turn-by-turn graphics with all vital information is displayed in 2-D or 3-D and Maps of U.S. and Canada are built-in along with a 12 million point of interest database. Real-time-traffic information to reroute around traffic delays and antenna is included along with a 90 day free trial period.The fullblown MP3 player offers browsing by Artist, Album, Genre, Song or Playlist. It will display ID3 tags for artist, title and album along with album artwork. MP3/AAC/WMA audio formats are supported along with Windows Media DRM 10 for compatibility with music and video download services. In video player mode the 4" high resolution WQGVA widescreen plays back hours of video and supports MPEG-4 and WMV9 video formats.All digital media is accessed via SD Card slot (SD card not included) and will accept SD and SDHC cards.

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