NavMan's iCN 630 standalone GPS car navigation system tries to address many of the problems associated with aftermarket GPS installations - first and foremost, the cost. At £999 (inc. VAT), it's reasonably priced compared to the cost of a built-in installation and you can move it between cars as often as you wish.
The magnesium alloy-cased unit is quite chunky and weighs 635g, but it features a large (and incredibly bright) 3.8in. 320 by 240 pixel, automotive-grade TFT screen with an anti-reflective coating and a wide-viewing angle. In addition, there's a 2in. speaker built into the rear for the voice guidance audio, as well as a flip-up antenna at the back, although we were usually able get a good fix without this being deployed. An external antenna can be fitted via an MCX connector.
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Included with the system are two mounting options - a semi-permanent, screw-fixed stand for dashboard mounting and a suction mount for windscreens. The suction mount is very strong and you can move the unit around in its lockable ball mount without fear of it falling off. You also get a mains adapter and a car charger cable - there's no internal battery.
The supplied maps cover the whole of the UK, Republic of Ireland and western Europe. However, the 64MB of onboard RAM is woefully inadequate - you can't even fit England into this. Luckily, though, there's a solution in the form of an integrated SD/MMC card slot that takes cards up to 512MB. Some resellers are now bundling a 128MB SD card, so it's worth shopping around.
You load the street-level SmartST maps and activate/update the unit's software via the supplied PC software (there's no Macintosh version). However, there's no PC-based route planning facility, although its competitors don't offer this either. You can back up and restore your saved Favourites and Shortcuts, though. PC connection is via a supplied USB 1.1 cable, so downloading maps - from 1MB to 29MB, depending on the level of detail available - isn't particularly speedy.
The iCN 630 has been designed with ease of use in mind and it's certainly not daunting to first-time users with the brief tutorial available at power-up. It's very quick to initialise and get a fix, then you navigate the simple menu interface to set up your journey. You choose your destination either by entering an address with the 8-way paddle switch and onscreen keyboard or by selecting a location manually on the map. There's currently no postcode input facility, which is something that definitely needs rectifying. You can add up to 100 locations as Favourites or choose from the 30 most recent destinations. Shortcuts allow you to access a stored destination with just two key presses, but there are only eight slots available. Another disappointment is the inability to plan multi-leg routes using waypoints, although you could get around this by programming the relevant waypoints as Shortcuts or Favourites.
On the move, the multilingual voice directions are admirably clear, loud and sound natural. A great feature is the Back-on-Track rerouting that gets you back on the route if you make a wrong turn, although it can take a while to kick in after warning you to do a U-turn a couple of times. When calculating your route, you can choose either 'quickest' or 'shortest' options and avoid urban areas, although you can't specify your vehicle type. The moving map display - showing speed, time to destination, heading or distance to go - can be fixed or in direction-of-travel mode, or you can simply view graphical intructions.
Overall, iCN 630 is an impressive product if you need a flexible GPS solution for the road and don't want the limitations of a PDA-based solution. And its few deficiencies are more than compensated for by its many strengths.
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