With my Spica freshly upgraded to Android 2.1 (I570EXXJE1), one of the first improved feature I tried was "Maps".

The remarkable changes with Android 1.5 are:
- The ability to retrieve the places saved  with Google Maps ("My Maps") from the list of displayable layers.
- The ability to get spoken turn-by-turn directions with the new Navigation tool.

I recently had to replace my 4.3" GPS (bricked during an experimentation, doh!) with
another cheap one advertised as "Galaxy's Thinnest GPS Portable Navigator" and sold at roughly €68 on Chinavasion.com and eBay. Despite the usual 21.5% VAT on arrival and an unexpected gigantic hidden fee from UPS (€13.5 !!!), it ended up just the same price as my previous device.

The main differences are: a nicer look, a bigger 5" screen, a faster CPU, WinCE 6.0, but no Bluetooth.



In many places, this unit is advertised as having a SiRFAtlas III but the one I received definitely reports a 533Mhz SiRFAtlas IV CPU which supposedly  means lower consumption and faster position fix acquisition from a cold start. I reckon it's the first time I see a GPS device picking the position from my office desk.

A microSD is present in the GPS unit, and it's filled with maps and voices for most parts of Europe.
iGO 8.3 is present, so it would seem ready for Text-to-Speech...if only the TTS dlls were not missing!
In fact the 2GB card provided is a bit too small to hold all the maps together with the required Loquendo files.

So, after cleaning some un-needed files, I could add them and it worked fine.

I was curious about the "enable the especial voice" option in the Volume settings, so I enabled it, expecting to hear something like "Hola, soy tu sistema de navegación por satélite!", but instead, it just enables some chime sounds to the touch screen interface.
About unlocking: well...the usual tricks to enable the ActiveSync mode didn't work.The user interface provides an option to browse to the executable to launch from the Navigation button (no more shell.ini or gpsrunfile.txt), but trying USBSetting.exe or a registry editor did not give the expected result and the unit still connects as a USB Flash Drive to the PC.

However the interface is already quite nice and complete with a good player, some games and it doesn't require special trick to swap from iGO to Amigo to TomTom, so this is not really necessary...but still, for the craic of it!...I guess it is possible to tweak it though, so I'll update this page when I come across a solution.



Pros:
- iGO 8.3 pre-installed
- SiRFAtlas-IV (despite the manual saying III)
- Good battery life 
- Fast response
- Compact casing for a 5" display with elegant look
- Navigation software can be swapped directly from the user interface.
- Speaker can be set very loud
- Good display quality and screen brightness

Cons:
- no bluetooth
- finishing could be better, you'll have to wipe some extra glue but that's all.
- less straightforward to unlock
- the cable of the car charger is a bit short

Product references: TMCDOV2ZWL, CVHW-CS23, GPS-C3250
Successor: CVSB-G252

Several Sony Ericsson GPS-enabled mobile phones come with Wayfinder as the main application. The software itself looks ok and could even (very) occasionally be used to guide you when driving. But there's a catch: after a trial period, you'll be invited to pay a yearly fee. And instead of availing for their "exclusive offer", you may prefer to buy an entry-level but decent dedicated GPS device for the same price!

However, there are free alternatives if you still wish to use your mobile phone as a PNA:

amAze is a free GPS application (ad-funded) working on most J2ME mobile phones.

An important trick to avoid expansive data traffic for streaming maps over the phone, is to use the arrows mode where only the small amount of data for the calculated route is sent to the phone. See more here.
Like Wayfinder, it also provides vocal instructions. Previous reviews of amAze highlighted the ugly interface and the slow response. All this has visibly improved now (I tried v4.5). It actually seems slightly ahead of its competitor: Nav4All . But this is open to discussion...

Some gadgets are a true pleasure to own, in particular the once that have a high price/tweak ratio.

This is the case of some cheap GPS devices out there that you can buy for less than €100 on the web. They're not too hard to unlock so they can be extended beyond their original purpose.

I recently purchased one of them from DealExtreme, not the nicest Personal Navigation Device, but quite complete and easily customizable.

That one is based on Microsoft Windows CE .NET 5.0 and uses a Centrality Atlas-III 372MHz CPU.
Included is a limited bluetooth stack intended to be used as an audio gateway for your phone, but nothing else, and certainly not transferring files. There's also an FM transmitter for redirecting the GPS audio to the autoradio. TMC is not included but a connector is present to add an external one. Beside the GPS feature, the interface allows to listen to mp3's, view pictures and watch divx movies (quite smoothly actually), and for this last activity, the FM transmitter is convenient so you can listen the soundtrack from your autoradio.

The original features provided might be enough for the average user and if you add a software like iGO Amigo, the added games and utilities of this successor of Igo 8 will be a nice complement.

But if you are an authentic geek, you'll want to explore further, and the first challenge is to determine the brand and model of the chineese GPS device.

At first look it could be mistaken with some Garmin Nüvi, but it's actually referred to in some places as "Navigo V2 Widescreen" (a 4.3" version of the model SY885).

From there, it is possible to find some compatible tweaking source.
Like many other models, there is a file on the storage card that contains the path to the GPS application, in this case it's called gpsrunfile.txt. All you need to do is to change the path for any other application (like USBSetting, which enables the ActiveSync mode) and it will launch from the "Navigation" button of the generic user interface.
The interest of enabling the ActiveSync mode is that it gives you a full access to the device, including its registry database, and that's the first step to making your limited PNA closer to a Pocket PC.
This site is the best place to start tweaking: http://navigo.wikispaces.com/



The original user interface can be easily replaced by a more powerful one; allowing to launch additional games and applications, more like a pocket PC.

I started replacing my interface with BBMenu, and it may well be more than enough for most users. But make sure you tried the beautiful MioPocket (*) before making up your mind!

The device I got came with the excellent navigation software iGO 8 but it's faily simple to add other softwares, the only limit being the SD card size.

(*) A word of caution for this particular device and MioPocket: while mine installed fine, the initial shell interface seemed to fight with the MioPocket shell to be in the background. In my case, it was necessary to edit the registry and inhibate the device's shell (HKLM\init launch50="PvShell.exe" to "")

Pros:
- Cheap
- Easy to hack
- Bright enough 480x272 screen

Cons:
- Touch screen need re-calibration at times
- Car charger noisy (hissing)