MapmyIndia launches India's first portable 3D navigator

Personal navigators, or GPS devices, are fast becoming popular in India. Gone are the days when asking for directions through the complex tangle of roads in our congested cities required you to ask the local rickshaw-wala or the (hopefully) good Samaritan about how to get to your destination of choice. Even then, there was usually no guarantee that you’d actually end up where u wanted to be, at least at the time you wanted to be there. But thankfully, that’s something that can be easily remedied by electronic devices and a bunch of geosynchronous satellites.

MapmyIndia was among the pioneers of bringing GPS navigation systems to India and over the years, they’ve perfected their local maps to a level which makes them one of the best and most reliable in the market. Last year, they even surprised everyone with the CarPad, a GPS navigation tab that merged the power of a full-fledged Android tablet with a portable navigator. This time around however, they’ve combined the popular handheld navigator with another popular modern technology, 3D.

Called the Zx250, this device offers an augmented reality-like experience with full 3D landmarks, 3D buildings and 3D elevation across hills and mountains, apart from the regular features we’ve come to expect like house-level search, built-in city and travel guides, detailed trip computer and turn-by-turn voice instructions. The 12.7 cm touch screen can be used as a music, movie and digital photo player and offers 2GB of internal memory as well as an expandable SD card slot of up to 8GB. The device can also doubles up as a hands-free by connecting to your phone via Bluetooth, and is able to stream audio, along with navigation instructions to the car’s audio system using a built-in FM transmitter. And if you want to get an aftermarket reversing camera fitted to your car, then the Zx250 can also double up as a rear-view mirror by connecting to it through its AV-in slot.

The device will also have the latest MapmyIndia Maps v7.0 which offer house-level maps for 36 cities, (20 of which are in full 3D), over 6.3 million places, 3D landmarks across India, street-level maps for 4000 cities and all 5,76,000 towns and villages connected seamlessly via 1.79 million km of highway and road network. The Zx250 certainly sounds like the whole shebang. But wait for a full “road-test” when we get our hands on one of these.