Get lost, if you can, that is

Gizmo Gallery: In six cities, to begin with, digital maps on satellite-based navigation systems make this near impossible.

Take the turn, 3rd exit, 500 yards’, a voice with a slightly American accent (and measurements clearly!) instructs me as I navigate my way back home from the office.

I’ll be damned if I let this pocket-sized PDA tell me to take a route I normally don’t take, and so turn off on Pandara Road in New Delhi instead of the Zakir Hussain it wants me to take. There, done it, let’s see how the little monster reacts, I think, testing Nippon Audiotronix’ SatGuide, India’s first motor vehicle navigation system.

My little friend who’s slightly thicker than a Palm PDA (it’s 112.8 x 69.6 x 16.3 mm and weighs 147 grams) and located right next to my steering wheel thanks to a suction-based holder that’s stuck on to my windscreen, isn’t disconcerted and when I’m a little distance away from the next turn, to the right, instructs me to turn there — apparently, there’s another way home that way as well using Shah Jahan Road.

Since I’m feeling cussed, I miss the turn, but, sure enough, before the next turn, there’s another audio prompt. When I get my eyes off the road and look at the SatGuide, it looks a bit like those TV screens you see on airplanes, with an green arrowhead on a map telling you where you are, and an Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) at your destination, presumably based on the speed at which you’re driving.

As you drive along the road, you can see your location changing and the names of the roads you’re crossing, but since this is not the safest way to drive, I suppose the best thing to do is to just go by the voice prompts.

The SatGuide is the result of the effort of four companies. The first is Homeland Securities Technologies Corporation of Canada that provides the Destinator software, which actually gets the SatGuide to figure out your exact location, the hardware is developed by Mio of Taiwan, the digital map database belongs to Satnav Technologies, which is a group concern of Satyam Computers, and Nippon Audiotronix (who are OE suppliers of the Kenwood stereos used in many cars as well as central locking/security systems) is the unit that has put this all together and markets it in India at Rs 38,000.

While the SatGuide I have has the map of the National Capital Region fed into it, you can buy, for Rs 3,000 each, maps of Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Bangalore as well. And, for the first year, you can get updates of these maps for free.

You’ll need the updates, for while the instrument I’m testing has the latest map, I discover through the course of two days, it hasn’t captured all the changes made. In some places, inside Gulmohar Park where I live, the prompt tells you to turn right while the turn’s been blocked off recently.

The device is powered by Windows 2003 and so has all the other facilities that come along with a Windows PDA, and that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, calendars and so on. The battery life is a decent 8-9 hours, and there’s a car charger thrown in for good measure. The processor is a 300 Mhz one and that’s good enough for most PDA functionalities.

Plan your trip: What’s more appealing than the directions themselves, are the other features the SatGuide offers, such as Trip Planner which allows you to plan your day in advance. So, if you want to see someone in the Fortis Hospital in Noida, and then go to the Lotus Temple near Nehru Place, while visiting an ATM on the way to pick up some money, simply go to Tools and add in the first address — that is, you go to the Hospitals sub-index, search for Fortis, and then add it to your Trip Planner.

Then do the same for the Lotus Temple and the ATM. There are around 25,000 Points of Interest that have been pre-fed into the SatGuide for Delhi alone. You can find streets and so on as well on it, but there is no provision to have detailed addresses — so, you can’t locate 47 Prithviraj Road on the SatGuide, and once you reach Prithviraj Road, you’re on your own.

What you can do, however, is once you’re at 47 Prithviraj Road, you can store the location, either as an address or as a name — it’s Assocham House — and so the next time you want to go there, your guide will take you to the exact spot. Since the SatGuide has an address book, you can link names to locations — say, you want to go to Sachin Tendulkar’s house, and if the address is in your phone book, it’ll take you there. To the road on which he lives, if you haven’t been there before and to the exact house if you’ve been there before and stored his coordinates.

At Rs 38,000 for the set, I think it’s a bit expensive, but may just be worth it if you travel a lot to places you’re not familiar with — plus, if auto companies build it into the price of upper-end models, once you EMI-it, the costs aren’t too high.

Mobile phone Navaids: A lower-cost alternative, not available as yet in India, would be mobile-phone based navigation — this works through mobile phone towers as opposed to satellites and is supposed to work just as well.

It also allows service providers to feed in avoid-this-route kind of information as well. Typically, existing packages that allow you to convert your smartphone into a powerful navigation system cost around Rs 10,000-15,000 or so, taking your effective cost to around what the SatGuide costs today since a decent smartphone costs around Rs 18,000-20,000. Of course, this alternative gives you a phone as well, and allows you to carry just one device. For that, however, you’ll have to wait a while, till your service providers like Airtel or Hutch decide to offer the service