First look: TeleNav Shotgun

The helpful folks at TeleNav shot me out their new Shotgun and here are my first impressions. If you are planning on buying a GPS device this holiday season, this is one to watch carefully. I’ve had the device in my hands now for about 30 minutes and already am very excited about it for 3 main reasons.

Excitement reason #1: POIs

TeleNav says it has 11 million POIs. The local Ikea, for some reason, shows up on no GPS devices that I have tested except my TeleNav phone GPS. No surprise that the Shotgun finds it easily as well. So far, the TeleNav’s connected search has always been able to find every location I’ve searched for. I cannot say the same for Garmin, Navigon and Dash.

I have found inputting a destination can be a royal pain in the AGPS on some models; but not the Shotgun. Forget about playing 20 questions, such as state, city, category, name — that gets old really fast. With the Shotgun you click Business, then spell a name. You’ll be asked if you want to find a nearby business or somewhere else so you don’t get all 72,000 Starbucks in the tri-state area. It is the fastest way to get your POI inputted that I’ve used.

Excitement reason #2: Traffic

The Shotgun, like the TeleNav’s phone GPS, checks in for traffic every 5 minutes while in route. You can also drag the map around with your finger to see if other routes you know might be less congested. The unit will even speak the incident, “two car accident 95 southbound.” How cool is that? One question I already have is, is TeleNav building a Dash-like network, as the devices certainly could send speed info back to a master data list and advise other drivers of speeds instead of relying on a traffic service as they currently do.

Excitement reason #3: Complete package

My experiences with devices from Navigon, Dash and Garmin all let me with wanting to mash-up parts of this with parts of that. For example, Navigon shows you exactly what the exit sign actually says vs. others that just say what road you are getting off at, I love that about Navigon. I also love the Yahoo local search of the Dash. Well, if you mash all these together I am betting you’ll come up with the Shotgun. It offers all the things I love: spoken street names, connected search, connected traffic, nice and simple GUI all in one package.

The $299 pricepoint seems well picked by TeleNav as it seems about $50 under its fighting weight (Garmin’s similar entry, the 260W, lacks connectivity). I am eager to get some miles in with this unit.

Product page: [TeleNav]