By A. Morales

I’ve had a chance to play with the Navigon 8100T and it seems to be a solid performer. Graphically speaking, it features a graphics accelerator that allows for almost smooth scrolling in 3D mode and even more smooth scrolling in 2D mode. The visuals are very good, especially the 3D Panorama view where you can see surrounding mountains or hills in perspective with 3D shading. In 2D mode, the display is crystal clear with a lot of detail. One of the few gripes that I have is that the fonts chosen aren’t the best and sometimes hard to read. Another is that the POIs aren’t always easy to find if you do not know the exact city their located in. Fortunately, there is a feature called Direct Address which allows you to set up three POI categories for direct lookup without need of knowing the city. Upon choosing one of those direct address POIs, it will return all of that category that it has in its database for the surrounding area. The 8100T features millions more POIs than its 7200T relative (one of the glaring weaknesses of the 7200T), so consequently, there are POIS all over the place on your display if you are zoomed in at maximum. There are 32 categories of POIs each with its own icon, and fortunately you can choose which of these categories you want to appear on your display so that you are not inundated with them. The unit features an autozoom which zooms out the faster you travel and vice versa.

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