We've had ours here at Computing Unplugged for a few days, so we've got some early impressions. Because we've only had it for a few days, we haven't had a chance to take it on a real road trip, and you really can't tell how well a GPS works until you rely on it to find your way someplace you've never been before.

Because of that, we're going to give you a hardware overview and first impressions, but we'll reserve our rating for a future article when we take the GPS technology through its paces. So, let's start with first impressions.

The size matter
Our first impression is that this is one sweet device, with a gorgeous screen. It's much smaller than I expected. Figure A shows it side by side with the Dell Axim X30 (a review of that's coming soon), and the PiN is actually smaller.

FIGURE A


The Dell is on the left, the Navman is on the right. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Of course, what really distinguishes the Navman PiN (which stands for Personal Information Navigator, a take-off on the PIM acronym) is the pop-up GPS receiver. You can see it clearly in Figure B, in its extended mode.

FIGURE B


The GPS receiver flips up and down, feeling quite secure. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Other than the small amount of extra space for the GPS, the Navman is quite small. In fact, other than the Palm Tungsten T3, we found the Navman PiN to be the smallest of a number of devices, as you can see in Figure C.

FIGURE C


The Navman PiN is actually quite tiny. Roll over picture for a larger image.

You can also get a good view of how the GPS receiver looks when it's closed in the above picture.

The device is actually the same as the Mio Digiwalker 168 from Mitac. In fact, when you pop in the Companion CD that comes with the PiN, you're running the Mitac installer. It's a bit confusing, but the device is still quite nice.

The software
The Navman PiN is a Pocket PC 2003 device and comes with a copy of Outlook 2002. Why, after Office 2003 and Outlook 2003 have been shipping for quite some time, this newly released product comes with Outlook 2002 is a bit of a mystery, but hey, it's free.

The navigator software itself, shown in Figure D, installs on the GPS with an included SD card. It's nice, because it makes setting up the handheld quite simple and is a really nice plus.

FIGURE D


Here's the 3D view for navigation. You can also get a top-down view, which I think I personally might prefer. Roll over picture for a larger image.

As I said, we haven't really had a chance to take the GPS navigation software for a full spin, so I'll hold off on more details for now. Instead, let's move onto the features of the handheld.