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Recommended
Yes*

Full Review
SvenOnTech has seen many GPS units and for the most part, GPS is GPS. What separates the boys from the men is interface, accuracy, and volume. Yes, men speak much louder. Accuracy has been pretty spot on for many manufacturers we’ve tested with only poor address placement being the real major problem in this area. When it’s time to turn in a complex intersection, Harman Kardon, like most others, do this well. For the most part, addresses on the GPS-310 were pretty much spot on with the actual location.

The only dismal aspect to accuracy we found was that Harman Kardon thought it not prudent to tell us if our end point was going to be on the left or right side. When you’re in a large busy city and you’re in the left lane of four, and then you notice when it’s too late that you need to be in the right lane, well, that sucks. In one instance when this happened to us, it took us ten minutes to get back to where we had to be due to the no u-turn signs everywhere. What a frustrating thing when the whole idea of a GPS is to get you to your destination without worry. This is why you see an astrek next to our recommendation. If you can live with this limitation, then yes, we recommend it. If not, move onto another brand. (According to our contact at Harman Kardon, all three models do not give street position of your destination.)

We took the GPS-310 all over the Bay Area and Central Valley of California. We put in over 40 hours of testing into this unit, and did so side-by-side with a competitor we’ve tested (and reviewed here on SvenOnTech.) We found the GPS-310 to be more accurate and quicker, when we missed a turn, to re-route us than the other unit. In all fairness, the other unit was about a year old and a lot can happen in this industry in just twelve short months. From San Francisco, to San Jose, to Fresno, to Stockton, to Manteca, to Elk Grove, to Sacramento, to Oakland, to Pittsburgh (CA), to Walnut Creek, and beyond, the GPS-310 just did an excellent job of getting us to our destination. Again, outside of the lack of telling us, “Hey, it’s going to be on your left side,” we couldn’t have been any happier with the GPS-310.

What we do really like of this well fitted unit, measuring in at 2-7/8″ x 4-3/4″ x 3/4″ (H x W x D), is that it is easy to put in your pocket and take with you on trips. The mount is superb, the best we’ve encountered. It will fold flat and allow for easy travel like the GPS. Instead of using those large bulky suction cups that are so difficult to seal to any surface, Harman Kardon kept it simple for its mount. Using a small suction cup and an easy to use latch, securing the mount to a window (even your sun roof as one of the Harman Kardon guys showed me at a demo) is a no-brainer. Popping on the GPS to the mount is just as easy. Man, if we would recommend a GPS solely on its mount, then Harman Kardon would win hands down.

Let’s talk about the interface. This is one are many GPS units reveal its weakness. This is not a problem with Harman Kardon. The menus are very easy to navigate and the soft-buttons are nice and large. When the processor isn’t falling behind, the buttons respond nicely to your finger presses and thus data entry is a piece of cake. What I really love about the GPS-310 is its automatic narrowing of choices. For example, if I’m entering a cities name, say Sacramento, as I enter S – A – C, the keyboard grays out letters that are not part of any possible matches helping prevent accidental key pressing and focusing your attention to the letters that are next. Further, when you’ve entered enough letters to narrow down the hit list to about five or so cities, the listing just pops up for you. Now simply select the correct city. Man, this saves a lot of time and is very convenient to have.

The GPS-310 comes with 17 languages built-in basically making this a device for any one to use. The crisp 4″ WQVGA touchscreen is large enough not being too small and is a really a nice break from the larger screens that are finding their way out on to store shelves. With Text-to-speech (TTS) support, the GPS-310 announces road and highways names (English) very clearly and near human as I’ve heard. The speaker is loud and does not distort at high levels like other units we’ve reviewed. Harman Kardon packed in 12 Million points of interest (POI) that include such places as restaurants, gas stations, hospitals and ATMs. Having needed an ATM on more than one occasion in a visiting city, the GPS-310 helped me avoid a service charge from a competitor bank of mine.

The entertainment side of the GPS-310 will eat SD cards up to 4 GB in size, large enough for a few movies and lots of music. The audio player supports MP3 and WMA (non-protected) formats. The player will display ID3 tag information such as artist, title and album name. The Harman Kardon also puts the album cover in the left side of the LCD if available in the ID3 tag. You can search for music or browse by artist, album, genre, song or playlist. Music sounds impressively good for such a small device and plays music even while navigating. Nice to have if you’re in a rental or friends car.

What we don’t get about the GPS-310 is why when you turn off the GPS unit, it’s dead a week later. What gives? This has happened to other units we’ve tested, too, so it may have something to do with the actual GPS guts. Either that, or OFF really isn’t OFF. What we do know is you’ll be lucky to get four hours of use from each charge and you’ll end up doing what we did: route the power cable under your dash up through the A pillar to connect it to your GPS-310 so you have constant power.

What’s in the box? A car charger, USB cable (for updates, charging and customization), fold-flat windsheild/dashboard mounting bracket, quick-start guide, and a carrying case. Nothings left out you wouldn’t need.

Overall
I can’t keep helping coming back to the sticking issue of end point location notification. This is the first GPS we’ve used in years that omits this very valuable piece of information. Like all things in life, we adapt and learn to get around limitations. Once this hurdle was jumped, we just loved this unit. Sure, it’s got a slow processor and sometimes it takes a while to register your finger presses, but it’s not that big of a deal. What is a big deal is the awesome mount, the rock solid mounted GPS (no bouncing anymore!!), excellent routing, great menus and interface, and the loud speaker that doesn’t strain you to listen for your next instruction.

Price: $299.99

Platform: Windows 2000 and higher; Mac OS X 10.2 and higher (Music transfers to SD card)

Product information