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Evesham BlueMedia BM-6380 GPS navigator

On the back is the unit's GPS antenna, which folds out and rotates round like a stand. Pressing the menu button calls up a set of buttons through which to select a destination. You can enter an address, select a pre-installed location of interest - tourist attractions, airports, railway stations, garages, that kind of thing - or pull up lists of favouite locations and previously visited places.

Bluemedia BM-6380 - Destinator

You can also enter lists of roads to avoid, but with the exception of motorways, it only accepts street names, not road classifications. Roads you want to avoid have to be recorded in categories. You need to create the category first, then edit the items stored within it. You can tell Destinator to avoid each category, or tell it to steer clear of individual roads within them. I'd rather it cut to the chase and just presented a list of roads to avoid, but without support for road classifications it's practically useless anyway. The radio will tell you there's a hold-up on the A508 near Northampton, not what street the jam is in.

Bluemedia BM-6380 - Destinator

The UI for selecting streets to avoid is the same one used to enter destination addresses: select the city or town from the list or shortcut down by entering characters on the virtual keypad to the right of the list. The keypad works like a mobile phone: letters are clustered, so pressing the first button three times in rapid succession displays 'C' rather than 'A', and so on. It's just like texting, and it allows you to operate the device with your index finger - a virtual QWERTY pad might be more useful, but you'd have to use the stylus.

Bluemedia BM-6380 - Destinator

When you've got your town entered, tap 'street' to select the road you want in the same way, then press 'number' to enter the house number. There's an icon nearby you can click that takes you through a variety of destination entry modes: street, city, number; postcode, street; street, postcode; city, street, street for intersections; and then back to city, street, number. At any time you can call up a mini map to where the place you've selected is.

You can add multi-stop routes, called Trips, which are entered using the same approach as the avoided roads: create a trip then add waypoints to it.

Bluemedia BM-6380 - Destinator

With a route in place, you can preview the route on a turn-by-turn basis or as a list of directions, the latter providing an opportunity to reject a particular part of the route which forces an immediate route recalculation. You can reformat the route for pedestrian use or vehicular.

Next page: Verdict

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