harman/kardon 410, 810 - the small and the large

I was the one to test the bigger brother. Besides the device itself, the box also contained a data cable, a charger, the passive holder, a leather-like case, a car charger, an object I called “mushroom” and of course some papers. The mushroom is a very clever remote control that functions with a pill battery and can completely control the navi, it’s something like BMW i-drive. It has a wheel, a silver button for up-down-left-right directions and its center is an enter key. It’s very cool, but I still preferred tampering with the touchscreen. However, those who have a car where the windscreen is far from the driver, or have an extremely short arm will probably like the small mushroom very much. You just have to stick it somewhere close on the dashboard.

The navi is made of a shiny, hard plastic; it has black and dark grey colors. The 4.3” TFT LCD on the front is readable even in sunlight. On the top we can see the power button, while the keylock is on the left. On the right there is a pot for setting the volume, under it there’s a 3.5 mm headset connector, than the SD card slot (SDHC-compatible, up to 32 GB). On the bottom there is the miniUSB connector and an extremely tiny reset gap, just like on the other one. On the back we can see an external antenna connector and the speaker, which has an exceptionally good sound quality.

The heart of the device is a 520 MHz Intel ARM processor; it has 128 MB RAM, while the GPS receiver is a SirfStar III, with very good sensitivity. The overall speed of the navi was completely okay. The map is stored on the built-in 2 GB ROM, so the memory card slot is free to use for music or pictures. We can listen to music on the device’s speaker, or with a headset, which has an outstanding quality, the one you would expect from the company.

Besides navigation, we can also use the device for playing back videos, viewing pictures or listening to music. All this multimedia content can be synced with Windows Media Player. We can create playlists, but we can search by artist or album. We can listen to music even while navigating (this is the most fun when the car radio is also turned on, and our passengers are talking to each other – this is a real test of our patience). 810 can also function as a Bluetooth handsfree car kit, and at a convenient quality. The box states that this is possible due to the fact that there is a microphone with double noise filtering inside the navi. It also supports voice calling and handles the phonebook too. (Gubro)