It is truly a pleasant surprise to see Jensen make it in the GPS navigation competition, but are their products worth the buzz? Debuting this quarter, the NVXM1000, AKA “Rock-N-Road” is a portable GPS navigation device with lots of rare features.
You’ll notice its screen is the standard portable GPS size, measuring at 4”. It is an LCD touchscreen display and it is capable of displaying both maps and digital media information. The colors and contrast depth is pretty average, and not enough to impress. There’s just something about the color. It’s not bad, but it has rather that dull look. From our experience, un-contrasting colors and less sharp images on portable navigation devices tend to be hard to see in direct sunlight. This may be quite problematic for those who travel often during rush hour when the sun is right in the line of sight of the navigation device.

However, with that put aside, the NVXM1000 does present itself well with several interesting and useful features. You’ll notice that on its left side it has two slots: one for an SD Card undoubtedly, but one for another similarly-shaped port that’s slightly bigger. This larger port is for an XM Radio mini tuner, which acts much like an SD Card. The mini-tuner is sold separately, but to have this feature means that you instantly have the option to having an XM radio in your vehicle, or wherever you go, thanks to this XM Satellite radio ingenuity. This means that users will have 170 XM channels as well as XM NavTraffic—a feature that allow drivers to check local real-time traffic reports.

The navigation unit is a NavTeq based system with over 11 million points of interest. It has maps of the United States as well as Canada. However, we are a little bit concerned of its processor. The Rock-N-Hard navigation unit only features a 300MHz Atlas II processor. In our experience anything slower than 400MHz tends to perform sluggishly and would frustrate drivers in busy locations such as metropolitan areas. In addition, for a unit that boasts 11 million POIs in 8GB of internal hard drive space, it only features a 64MB RAM. So now you have a slow processor, with a ton of things to do and display.

Another bad aspect of the NVXM1000 is its awkward shape. It’s not a great symmetrical design, and makes mounting a harder task, especially for those of us who wish to have a more integrated look in our vehicles.
The NVXM1000 Rock-N-Road has great concept ideas, but needs to implement these ideas with better components and features. It’s also a bit expensive for its bulkiness. Its design appear to have come from the 1990s and doesn’t present itself to be impressive.