You probably know Delphi as the company that made the tape deck in your Camaro, circa 1987. Well, Delphi's still around, and now it's jumping into portable, car-centric electronics sold directly to consumers instead of just automakers.

The Delphi NAV200 is the company's foray into GPS. I've given it a spin for about 400 miles, and while the unit has some charms, it's still hard to recommend over competing devices.

At its current price of $299 (MSRP is $400), the NAV200 flirts with the cheapest GPS units on the market. It's got a suction cup mount and cigarette lighter adapter as you'd expect, making it easy to use on the road. One of the big selling points: It's preloaded (via an included  1.5GB SD card) with maps of the U.S. and Canada. In general I found them quite complete and accurate, and it's nice not to have to fiddle with your PC to load maps onto the device before you use it. My only problem with them: The attractions (restaurants, gas stations, etc.) were quite out of date, often by two years or more.

Another killer feature: The NAV200 can play audio and video and display photos. There is even a rudimentary calculator and a simple game: Othello. Few GPS units at this price offer such features, but then again, few will think of using their GPS as a portable TV.

The main problem I had with the NAV200 I had from the start: It's slow to boot, slow to accept commands, slow to load maps. Getting started can take several minutes, and that's not even considering the time it takes to get a lock on a satellite. The interface is designed for beginners (you're really able to just plop this on the dashboard and go), but certain settings are terribly hard to find: Most notably, you'll get completely wrong info until you set your time zone. But wait, you might say, can't a GPS figure out what time zone I'm in automatically? Yeah, that's what I said.

In the end, I was on my way home from a 180-mile journey when the NAV200 abruptly stopped charging via the cigarette adapter. Eventually the battery died, and that was that. There's no A/C adapter included either, so the NAV200 is basically a paperweight for me now.

I'll assume I just have a buggy unit, but even if the charging system worked fine, it would still be tough to recommend the NAV200 over similarly-priced offerings from TomTom or Garmin, thanks to the interface alone. That is, unless you really love Othello.