Sony’s first sat-nav

It’s a dark day for TomTom, Garmin and Navman – Sony’s just entered the in-car portable GPS market.

Sony’s debut is the NVX-P1, which has a 2GB hard drive, 9.5cm screen, detailed maps for the whole of Europe excluding Greece – did they really hash up the Olympics that badly? – 3D maps and what Sony is promising will be a very intuitive user interface.

It looks okay, but TomTom isn’t really going to be quivering at this particular Sony sat-nav. After all, TomTom has the Go 700, which has more storage and a touchscreen, a far easier way of controlling a sat-nav than hard buttons.

Longer term, Sony’s likely to get very serious in this space – a future version with a bigger HD and some sort of collaboration with Sony Eric phones could be a real killer product.

The Sony NVX-P1’s on sale in August for a price that’s currently TBC.

Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home