It’s ok guys, I am not dead yet! Neither am I lost, because I have my trusty Becker Traffic Assist Highspeed GPS (Also known as Becker Traffic Assist Highspeed 7934 GPS outside of the US) with me! Well not really because of it but it makes a good intro doesn’t it? So like what you would expect from me I got this gps on sale and it was a pretty good deal. I know it’s not the usual Tom Tom or Garmin (it’s a German brand so it is not as common on this side of the Atlantic) but it’s a pretty good gps overall. The device has a 3.5″ touch screen with a 400MHz processor and an SD card slot for the map and storage and runs on Navteq and Navigon. The device officially can view pictures and play mp3/wma; but if you’re into hacking you can do so much more. More on that later.

The Navigation

The device basically only has 1 button, a hard switch to turn the device on and off and a touch screen for input. The button functions as a sleep and back button. The sleep function is pretty useful because the device cold boot takes 12 seconds. Not counting the time it takes for the gps to get a signal from their satellites and for it to load the navigation software. And that is a big deal because the device takes a while to get a signal sometime up to a minute or more while the navigation software takes almost 12 seconds to load . Which is really a problem because most of the time the gps wouldn’t find signal inside the house so I would have to take it to the car first. Then while you’re driving out of the driveway you realize that you don’t know which way to turn out of the driveway because you don’t know where you’re suppose to go. So this is a huge con for the gps being not able to do its job until you’re well on your way. Which makes it useless for shorter drives.

The loading screen that you will see often.

That being said once you get the baby going it works Ok. It has a predictive text input that will hide letters that are impossible to press (but you can turn it off if you don’t like that). The method of navigation input includes by address, by point of interest, through manually selecting the place on the map and by coordinates. The address input is like any other gps device and works fine. Although because of the problem I said above in which you can’t start your navigation until a good moment, I wish I can input two place and just show the route without the gps portion. Unfortunately you can’t. That being said you can add more than one destination (like an itinerary) although if you don’t have signal it will just show you flags on the map so you have to figure out your route like on a normal map. you can do so by clicking and holding the place you want to go and choose add.

The map with POI and night mode.

Now the POI of the device needs some improvements as well. Although it is fundamentally a good POI system as it can search within a town, nationwide or nearby GPS position. It doesn’t really have that many poi as I would like. I mean it doesn’t even have basic stores like Walmart which is everywhere here. but it has some of the basic necessity like gas station (which is called a Petrol Station on the device by the way, darn Europeans ), restaurants, hotels, and banks etc.. So if you’re just in a town you don’t know and would like to find a non specific place it is fine. But if you would like to find a specific restaurant or store, this might not have enough POI for you.

After you use the device for a while you can also select your destination through your history or through a saved destination. There is also few option you can have on the map like night/day mode, always keeping north, and a 3D mode. But it is notable the 3d mode is not very 3D as you would expect. It’s just the normal map skewed to make it look like you have a birds eye view. But nothing is really 3d. Other niceties on the navigation portion is that you can select a short or fast route, avoid motorways, ferries or toll roads. It can also show you your current coordinates and your current speed. And if you like to drive fast the gps can even tell you to slow down base on your speed on the gps. Although I wouldn’t know because I never drive over the speed limit

The device is about the size of 1½ x 1 post it note.

Also you may have some trouble when you’re diving on the freeway as sometimes it won’t register when you take the exit it tells you and sometimes it thinks you did take the exit when you didn’t. This might cause problems as it won’t be able to tell you to turn when you need to when you exit. Thereby making the device basically useless. But I can imagine this happens in a lot of gps devices. And you can also bypass the problem if you can look at the map for a moment and take the right turn.

The Other Things

Now like I said in the beginning the device can playback music (mp3/wma) and view pictures (jpg). They are both very basic, but good enough and does their respective jobs. Basically the only button in the picture viewer is a full screen toggle. Beside a normal headphone jack, the device also has 2 speakers in the back so you can pump your music through the player’s speaker. The speakers are nice, clear and loud. Although not a lot of base can be heard. There is also a plus and minus of having the speakers in the back. On the plus side is that if you put the device on a hard surface the sound will reflect nicely and sound great. On the other hand if you put it on a soft surface the sound will be incredibly muffled. So you wouldn’t want to want to put this on top of clothing in the car to try and keep it stable. Fortunately the device comes with a windshield mount.

The 2 speakers and the external antenna port on top.

The Windshield Mount

The mount has 2 axis. One for tilt and the other for pan as you would expect. It is very sturdy and doesn’t seem like it is going to fall off. It works well and that’s it. Nothing ground breaking, it just works. Simple enough. Not a bad freebie.

The free windshield mount.

The Hack

As I said in the beginning, the device can officially be used to play mp3/wma and view jpg. But if you’re into hacking like me, you can easily add more programs and games to the device. You see the device has a hidden Window CE 4.2 which makes the device basically an HPC/pocketPC. To get to the hidden OS what you do is select setting from the main menu then click information. From there you can see a Navigon logo. Click it 3 times and you should be taken to an explorer window. You can transfer files through ActiveSync or through the SD card. Although keep in mind anything not saved in the “My Flash Disk” will automatically be deleted on a hard shut down (the switch on the right). So you will want to transfer all your programs there. You can see many video of this in action on YouTube. A great place to get started is “Gapi for HPC’s”. This will allow you to install other map like MioMap or iGo on the Becker Traffic Assist Highspeed 7934, games and other pocketPC programs.

The device compared to the SD card with the map.

Conclusion

Overall I think this is an ok device, although it could use some improvement. Mostly the whole needs to take forever to get a signal deal. The Map and POI also needs to be updated. But that can be easily fix by adding another map. I give this Becker Traffic Assist Highspeed 7934 a 6/10. If the device is on sale like mine was (I got it for $99) I would suggest buying it, but if it’s at the regular price ~$249.99 I woulod suggest getting a different and newer model for a better map.

You can see more pictures here.

[update] Thanks to one of my reader and a fellow blog for correcting my giant typo. It is actually 7934 and not 7394.

Popularity: 52% [?]