The Japanese domestic car market has the world's highest penetration of factory-installed navigation systems. It's not hard to figure out why: the road system is complicated, and making a wrong turn could add significant delay due to traffic congestion. Many of these navigation systems are extremely sophisticated and feature Bluetooth wireless connections to mobile phone accessories, television reception, live traffic reports, and even photo albums, to remember the children you rarely see. Auto manufacturers make a lot of money selling these systems.
Japan's early and enthusiastic embrace of these systems means that portable navigation devices (PNDs) haven't really caught on yet. However, the market is changing. Flash memory now competes favorably with DVD storage, and many Japanese are willing to accept 80% of the function at 10% of the price. Also, up until this year expatriates only had two choices for English-language navigation systems. Both are full sized DVD-based (and/or hard disk-based) systems priced at about $2,500 installed. Nissan offers one of these systems, both for its own vehicles and for other vehicles. They do work fairly well in English, with English voice prompts, but street names are still in Japanese. Most owners learn to save locations into the navigation system's database, perhaps struggling to reach the destination the first time. Another option is to enter a landline telephone number, and the navigation system will guide you to the general area corresponding to that number. These capabilities are extremely valuable to bewildered expats, and there's no question these big screen systems have advantages.
This year two companies started shipping English language PNDs for the Japanese domestic market. One device is called the Shake!350, sometimes also written as SHAKE 350, from GrandMap Navi. This device weighs just over 150 grams and has a small 3.5 inch touch sensitive color screen, rechargeable battery with home and car chargers, car mounting bracket, 1 GB of flash memory with a slot to add more, USB cable, English voice prompts, and, best of all, English (i.e. Romanji) street and location names displayed on the map and in the location search screens. With a little on-line comparison shopping I was able to find a brand new one on sale for a mere 29,000 yen. The company seems to provide free downloadable database updates on its Web site, although all the Web pages are in Japanese. Even so, I could figure it out with a little help from Google's translator, and they do have a PDF copy of the product manual, in English.
Unlike some of the factory-installed systems, PNDs don't have gyroscopes or other motion sensing features that augment GPS. Thus the GPS signal will occasionally drop out in tunnels and in urban "canyons," with tall buildings blocking GPS satellite coverage. Also, the screen is typically much smaller, and car installation isn't as neat or integrated. However, one major advantage (which some higher priced Japanese mobile phones share) is that you can take a PND on a bicycle or on a walk. There's also the price advantage of course.
These trade-offs seemed acceptable to me, so I ordered a Shake!350 today, and I should receive it later this week. I'll try to post a product review in a couple weeks. For the record, JROAD also offers two PNDs in this narrow category (i.e. domestic Japanese PNDs with English language support): the JRN400 and JRN410. These two models are pretty much identical, except the JRN410 has flashing LEDs that signal left or right to the driver. The LEDs seem like overkill on top of voice prompts, but Japanese gadget makers have never been shy about adding gimmicks. On paper the Shake!350 looks slightly better overall, although JROAD may have the superior GPS receiver. Both share one major disadvantage, especially for Mac OS X and Linux users: they run Microsoft Windows CE (a.k.a. Windows Mobile). How do I update the Shake!350's database using Mac OS X, for example? PocketMac or Missing Sync may do the trick. I might get lucky and be able to mount the device just like any other USB drive to copy files, and hopefully a simple file copy is enough.
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