This, though, illustrates some of the idiot savant aspects of the software. While the blue mapping path was correct, the green arrow was wrong, and the disembodied voice just simply repeated, over and over, a disapproving "you are off route."

Once you get used to it, though, and realize that Ostia's both brilliant and stupid, you can generally interpret her intentions and get back on the road in the right direction.

Sadly, the reason we were going in the wrong direction was that Ostia decided to do a map scale update right in the middle of one of the most complex sets of intersections coming off the George Washington Bridge. As a result, we had absolutely no navigation support during the two or three most critical turns that would get us to the ball park.

I need to be clear though: this product is still pretty amazing, despite its rough spots. And there are more rough spots.

Finding your destination
Don't expect to be on the road and use the GPS with Ostia and your Pocket PC to dynamically choose a new destination. The process of locating and entering destinations is exceedingly painful. First, you have to choose a street. Once the huge list of streets loads, then you choose a city.

This is stupid. There might be a hundred Main Streets in the mapping database, but only one in Piscataway. Why you can't choose the destination city first, and then the streets is beyond me.

Second, the street names are a bit difficult. For example, we wanted to go into the city, to West 42nd Street. The mapping software only knew of it as 42 W. Sometimes it likes RT for route, sometimes RTE. Sometimes, you're going to US 22, sometimes to RTE 22, and sometimes to US-22. If you don't guess the street correctly, it won't find it.

Obviously, they bought their map database from some other company, but the inconsistencies are incredibly annoying.

Here's another inconsistency: according to Ostia, Piscataway, NJ doesn't exist. Oh, it knows that something's in Somerset County, but has no record of Piscataway. I never liked the town, anyway. Strange place. Better off gone.

Loading maps
The key to finding your destinations is to load them up before you leave the house. The best way to do this is to load the included MapFinder software onto your PC, and do all your searching while both connected to MapFinder and the Internet, using a combination of MapFinder, Mapquest, and Yahoo's direction service to find the right spot on the map, and then program it into Ostia.

You can load as many maps onto your memory card as you can fit. Like I said above, I got quite a few loaded onto 256 meg. However, you can only load ten maps into the internal memory of the handheld, and you have to make sure you load the right maps for the route. For example, if you're going from New York City to Philadelphia, you're going to need to go through a number of New Jersey counties. You better make sure to figure out which maps those are and have them loaded as well, or you're just not going to make it.