HP Announces its iPAQ 300 Series Travel Companion Personal GPS Navigator

Although it's not exactly the most successful PND manufacturer around, HP has launched quite a wide range of such products over time in its iPAQ Travel Companion series. And it would seem that they're about to come up with yet another family of such products, namely the 300 series, which offers some very interesting navigation-related functions, as well as some very impressive technical specs.

Thus, according to the manufacturers' statement, the device offers just about every feature one might expect from an advanced GPS navigation system, including here a high-resolution 3D navigation system, turn-by-turn directions with both spoken and on-screen guidance, as well as panning and zooming to the user's detail level of choice (thus, for example, users can zoom in from 10,000 feet to street level view).

Moreover, much like any PND should, the device sports an advanced 4.3-inch transmissive TFT 16-bit RGB depth 65,000 color WVGA 800 x 480 pixel touch screen display, coated in a special antiglare material. The device has quite a serious amount of computing power as well, since it is built around a Centrality Titan 600MHz processor, includes 128 MB of SDRAM for running various applications as well as a 2 GB of Flash ROM for storage purposes.

The device is powered by a 1700 mAh Lithium Ion rechargeable, user changeable battery and connects to a computer via a mini-USB connector, which can be used for synching/data transfers or charging. Moreover, it features a high-capacity SD card slot for upgrading the storage capacity, as well as a large speaker for navigation volume (as well as for the multimedia playback functions), integrated microphone with echo cancellation and an integrated Bluetooth v2.0 with EDR module, which turns this device into a handsfree communication system as well.

Unfortunately, no details regarding this thing's pricing or availability have emerged up until now, but it will probably hit the shelves before the year's end.

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