Strada CN-GP50U Portable Navigation Device

[ background music ] >> Okay, so let's say you're a major consumer electronics company and you want to enter the most crowded competitive field you can find, you know, kind of a challenge. What would you do? You'd start making PNDs, portable navigation devices. And here's one from Panasonic, they're first. The Strada. Now as you look at it, what's the first thing you think? Yeah, that's what I thought. It's like one of their plasma TVs shrunk way down, that's kind of the style. So the look and style's a big part of their argument. Secondly, good size screen. That's a five inch there, you don't find that on many in the market. Touch screen as you can see as I navigate around. Now this home screen is customizable, and it's one of their big differentiators they say. You can make those three main buttons, the big guy there and the two on the right, whatever you want. So it's your interface, not theirs. The actual resolution on the map looks pretty good, that's nice fine dot pitch and pretty good rendering on the artistic side. And this is cool, you can turn on speed limit warnings like this one. Warnings within urban areas, when you hit that choice, you can say warn me when I'm five, ten, fifteen miles an hour too fast. It uses GPS to calculate your speed, and NAVTEC map data to know if you're going too fast on a given road. It'll give you a warning up here to slow you down. It's also a Bluetooth hands free rig of course, that's not too unusual. And it has a Bluetooth SIM profile, so your address book loads into it. You can program five hundred custom voice commands, oh and check this out. I've seldom seen a PND maker get so excited about their mounting bracket. But here it is holding up a ten pound block of steel, as you can see, it's been doing that for hours, and so far so good. They say it's really robust, and also has some interesting mounting options, so you don't have to stick it to your windshield. Now, why not? Because on the windshield is illegal in California and Minnesota. So they give you a dashtop disc you can also use, you bond that to the top of your dash. You mount it there, you'll be legal in all fifty states. Okay, so availability on this guy. Mid December, which is hard up against the holiday buying season, so that's kind of interesting timing. A lot of folks may get nervous and get something else instead, but that's the way it's coming out. Five hundred dollar MSRP, seems like a pretty good price for the features and the screen real estate. Of course you can expect discounting on the street. That's the Panasonic Strada.