Why You Can Trust CNET Navman Move 30 review: Navman Move 30
You get what you pay for with the Move 30. You don't pay much, but a little more gets a much better GPS, and at this price point, we'd lean towards a GPS app instead.
Navman pitches the Move 30 as "the perfect GPS system for those who want solid navigation at an affordable price".
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Affordable is, as always, the nice marketing way of saying that this is Navman's budget GPS. It's pretty easy to find it online for around AU$79, which is exceptionally cheap for a satellite navigation unit, but it's against that budget matrix that it's fair to judge it. Budget usually means that corners have been cut to meet a price point.
One thing you won't get in the Move 30 is a particularly large screen or, for that matter, a particularly good one. The Move 30 has a 4.3-inch touchscreen, which means that your smartphone most likely has larger screen dimensions than it does. Given the Move 30's overall dimensions, your smartphone is probably a little thinner too.
Screen reflectivity is a major issue with this particular unit. At default daylight brightness, we had trouble making out detail until we pumped up the brightness to full whack. Even then, if we popped a pair of sunglasses on, it was still a little murky.
On the upside, being small means that it's easy to stow away in your glovebox when you're not using it, and it doesn't form a large block in your vision while driving.
Performance
Actually, using the Move 30 provided a very mixed experience. Navman shares the same user interface (UI) across all its products, which meant that a lot of the driving we did felt similar to when we tested the excellent Navman MY450LMT, right down to the inclusion of real-world Landmark Guidance. Navman's UI shouldn't pose a challenge to anyone, even if you've never used a Navman GPS before.
That's the good stuff. The trade-off for that is that the screen, apart from sometimes being murky, isn't terribly responsive. Sometimes we had to jab multiple times to select letters or options, which quickly grows tiresome.
The Move 30 offers the same set of selections when it comes to route choice as the MY450LMT (Fastest, Shortest, Easiest, Most Economical), but the Move 30 chugs and thinks for quite a while before giving you those options. The same is true of route recalculations, where it would often pause for a while when you go off course. That's not going to be a major issue at slow speeds, but in several instances, we whizzed past alternate valid routes while it was still thinking.
Conclusion
The Move 30 is what it is for a reason. If you want premium GPS features and performance right now, you've got to pay for it. The problem there is that you really don't have to pay all that much more to get the premium experience.
The Move 30 is perfectly capable, but then so are the GPS apps you can buy for your smartphone, some of which are cheaper — even than the Move 30's asking price. We think there is still a place for stand-alone GPS devices for those who need them on a continual basis, but if you're in that group, the experience you get out of a more capable unit is in a different league. If you're really cash strapped and need intermittent GPS, a screen mount and inexpensive smartphone app would offer the same or better experience in a better-performing package.