Asus’ MyPal A636 is quite a chunky PDA, similar to the Mio and Navman. Its integrated GPS antenna flips out from the back, and can be positioned to suit landscape or portrait use. Right-handers will find the stylus awkward to get at as it’s on the left of the device.
In spite of the dated appearance, the A636 runs Windows Mobile 5, offering persistent memory by storing everything in ROM and eliminating concerns about data loss from a flat battery.
Destinator PN software provides navigation guidance and has many good features, such as the walking mode’s use of footbridges, the trip planner’s ability to optimise waypoint order, and a toggle function for the home button to navigate to a preset POI instead, such as the nearest petrol station. It also has fully customisable road avoidance, so you can permanently exclude particular roads, and over-speed warnings.
However, searching for an address is frustrating. The phone-style keyboard is a big hindrance (it takes 16 key presses to enter “Oxford”), and the suggested address list is poor. It doesn’t filter on suffixes such as road or street, so after entering a name you must scroll down past avenue, close, court and others.
And with just a single mention of each street (Station Road, for example) instead of listing them all with postcodes, it’s difficult to find a road that doesn’t have a unique name. However, there’s at least the option
of starting with street instead of city – a useful method that some more sophisticated programs lack. Finding locations from our Contacts database was a hit-and-miss affair.
On the road, Destinator took us to our destination with minimum fuss and we found the 3D map easy to follow. Only in built-up areas did it become a little slow to warn us of turns. The unintuitive clutter of onscreen icons disappears after a time, although trip information such as ETA remains small and difficult to read.
The mounting kit includes a windscreen suction mount with a ball joint to twist the cradle from portrait to landscape. The cradle converts the flat connector for the cumbersome desktop sync/power cable arrangement into a simple round power socket for the cigarette lighter adapter.
As a combination, the Asus MyPal A636 with Destinator PN provides some great features that are hard to find in competing products, but the cluttered layout and poor address searching take away much of the shine.
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