Hands on with TeleNav's Shotgun GPS

TeleNav is best known as a supplier of GPS software for cell phones -- where it's easily the tops on the market -- and now it's introducing its first ever hardware device, the pint-sized TeleNav Shotgun handheld GPS unit.

Alas, the Shotgun is a little rough around the edges. You can tell TeleNav doesn't have a lot of experience with hardware: The power adapter cord is too short and the suction cup for windshield mounting is awful. I couldn't get it to stick for more than 60 seconds no matter what I tried.

The 4.3-inch screen looks good, and using the device to enter a destination is a snap. But then the Shotgun drops the ball: Put simply, the directions it offers weren't very good in my tests, with the unit frequently planning U-turns and sometimes outright wrong-way directions. If you make a detour, the Shotgun is slow to re-route. Several times I'd already made another turn before the Shotgun could figure out where I was, making it re-route and re-route several times in a row, often talking over itself all the while... and that's when it could figure out what street I was on (the unit actually asks you to tell it where you are if it can't figure things out for itself). Even the animated arrows indicating the direction you're supposed to go were also a little cheesy, in my opinion. On the plus side, the unit's maps are easy to understand, and the real-time traffic updates (90 days of service are included) are helpful and well-integrated into the display.

Like the vaunted Dash Express (which is now being discontinued as the company retrenches), the Shotgun offers extensive search capabilities via a cell phone data connection, with 11 million points of interest, including phone numbers for each. Want to find gas? The Shotgun keeps tabs on prices and can find the cheapest fuel around. In the future the company also plans to integrate reviews into the device. Now if only I could rely on the Shotgun to get me there in a timely fashion.

At $300, the price is right, but the hardware needs work. And the guy who decided to put a bright, blue, flashing LED on the front of the device needs to be fired.