LG LN735
LG is primarily known for the mobile phones and widescreen televisions. However like a host of other electronics companies they have recently entered the GPS market. The LG LN735 GPS is due to be one of the more popular LG models due to the small size and text-to-speech capabilities. I’ve spent some quality time with the LN-735, and here is what I found.
Physical
The LN735 comes with a standard 3.5 inch touch screen display. Like most other 3.5 inch models from other manufacturers, it runs at a resolution of 320×240 pixels. However unlike other models that offer 64,000 color displays, the 735 can display 260,000 colors. Thus I had high hopes for the quality of the display. Unfortunately I only found the display quality to be average. The display has a matte finish and looks grainy. Text displayed on the map doesn’t appear to be as crisp as other devices in the same category. When viewed from wide angles to the side the screen performed fairly well, however when tilted up and down the screen colors quickly washed out. Today was a great warm sunny spring day and when the sun was behind be shining on the screen it was very difficult to read. In more common lighting conditions the screen was readable, but not very vivid. The screen isn’t horrible, but other GPS device sin this category have a better quality screen and we expected a little better from a company who makes such nice LCD monitors and televisions.
Surrounding the screen, the GPS itself is a glossy black color and is quite attractive. On the right of the display is a menu button that also serves as a sleep button as well as volume up/down buttons. You won’t use the volume buttons much though! more on that later. On the left side of the LN735 is an SD card slot and USB cable slot. Maps come pre-installed in the internal memory so the SD card slot is free, ready to be loaded with your SD cards containing MP3 music files and photos. The top is clean and the only item on the bottom is a reset switch. Along the right is the on/off switch and the power connector. Thankfully there are no buttons in the way along the bottom. On the back is where you will find the speaker and a mysterious hole covered by a rubber grommet. The manual says the hole is an “external GPS antenna jack” but there was nothing inside there for a GPS antenna to connect to.
When I took the LN-735 out of the box one of the first things that struck me was the size of the GPS itself. Other GPS devices in this class with the same size screen are about 3.8″ in width while this LG GPS comes in at 4.3 inches in width; a full .5″ wider for the same size screen. Overall weight is however about the same as competitive devices weighing about 5.6 ounces.
The suction cup mount worked fairly well. It is is a little bit longer than the ones that come with the Nuvi or the TomTom ONE, but nowhere near as big as other devices. It functioned on a ball and socket joint that allowed for easy adjustability yet held the device firmly in place. Even on rough roads I didn’t experience any vibration problems. I often like to locate the GPS at the very left edge of the dash where it is close to my sight yet out of the way. The power adapter was just barely long enough to reach the plug near the center console of my vehile.
Under the hood this LG GPS is equipped with a SiRFstarIII chipset, and a processor that seems speedy enough for most tasks. Windows CE Core 5.0 drives the applications.
Address Navigation
To navigate to a street address you enter the menu by pressing the menu button on the right of the GPS, or by clicking the menu button on the map display. From here you select ‘Address’, and then the state/province you are going to. As is a common gripe I have with many devices, you cannot enter a state abbreviation and instead need to spell out the state name. So once I finally typed in “N E W - Y” it finally got the clue I wanted to go to somewhere in New York. After selecting the state the LN735 asks if you want to enter a city and then street, street and then city, an intersection, or a zip code. I selected City-Street and it prompts you for the city, then the name of the street, and finally the house number. When entering a house number there are no hints available for valid street numbers. Other devices will typically show you a range of valid numbers for that street. It didn’t like the street number for one of the addresses I tried to navigate to and it didn’t offer anything helpful like the valid range or the closest valid value. After finding your address, you can select ‘Go’ to navigate to that address or save the address to a category of saved destination.
Navigating to a Point of Interest
Navigating to a POI can be done by going to the menu and selecting POI. From here you can select from a list of twelve primary categories. Select ‘Food’ for example. In most categories subcategories are available and the Food category was setup like this so I selected ‘Restaurant’. There are some subcategories that have yet another level of categories and here I selected Italian. Finally a list of matching POIs are displayed sorted by distance from your current coordinates. You can also sort the list alphabetically. In addition to searching by POIs close to you, you can also select to search for POIs near your destination or near a different address. The LN735 will search a maximum of 50 miles if you change the default settings.
There were a couple of things I didn’t like about searching for POIs. When subcategories are available you are forced to select one of them to look in. This can be cumbersome when you are not sure exactly which category the POI might belong in. This can become especially difficult when POIs appear in categories that just don’t make sense!. For example Autozone appeared in the ‘Computer & Software’ category but not in the ‘Auto Service & Maintenance’ category. If you are looking for office supplies would you look in Computer & Software, Department Store, Discount Store, Entertainment Electronics, Shopping Center, Specialty Store, or Variety Store? If there was a way to perform a text search across multiple categories it would have helped.
Planning Ahead
The LN735 offered no way to set your starting location. This is a feature not found on a huge amount of GPS devices, and I still don’t understand why. Let’s say I’m flying to Denver this afternoon and will be driving from the Denver Airport to my hotel. Sitting here on the East Coast I have no way for the GPS to tell me how long my drive will be this evening from the airport to my hotel.
Detours
There is a detour function. If you are coming up on a blocked intersection you can click menu, Route Manager, Detour, and then select from four settings on how far you want your route to be detoured ahead of you. You can select from 0.1, 0.3, 1, or 2 miles.
You can also select specific intersections/turns to avoid in your route. Clicking on the next turn graphic brings up a list of instructions. You can select one of the instructions and then click the ‘Avoid’ button to avoid that area.
Multiple Destination Routing
LG does offer multiple destination routing in the LN735. They call this function the “Multistop Planner”. Here you can add multiple addresses or POIs into a list of destinations creating one itinerary. I’m really glad to see this feature added as many GPS “power users” couldn’t operate efficiently without this function. Their Multistop Planner doesn’t work as well as the TomTom Itinerary planning feature, but at least the offer something. My gripe with out they implemented this functionality is that you cannot see how long or how far the entire list of stops is. So it really doesn’t create “one route” with multiple stops but rather a series of individual routes. Once you “arrive” at one destination it creates a new route to the next destination on the list. You can also only add five locations to the Multistop Planner.
Navigating
The primary navigation screen is setup very similar to other competitive devices. Along the top text is displayed showing the name of the next street. You can also zoom in and out on the map. At the bottom left is a graphic showing the next turn direction as well as the distance to that next turn. Along the bottom center you can see how far your destination is as well as the time it will take you to get to your destination and your current speed. Below that you can see the name of the current street. You can also click on the time to destination display to view the estimated arrival time. Personally I would rather see that information in place of my current speed!. I have a speedometer in my car that does that job nicely.
As you approach an intersection the LN735 will zoom in closer on the intersection. However it didn’t zoom in as much as I would have liked to see the necessary detail in complex intersections. Mapping data on the LG LN-735 GPS comes from NAVTEQ and is based on their second quarter 2006 release.
You can see POIs on the map display if you choose. Using the POI menu (as if you were navigating to a POI) you can select which categories you would like displayed and those items will appear on the map.
Perhaps one of my biggest disappointments on the LN735 was the audio. The speaker was very quiet, even at the loudest volume settings. Turn the volume up as high as it will go and you will never touch the volume buttons again. At highway speeds I had a difficult time hearing the directions at the loudest volume settings. I couldn’t find a button to have it verbally repeat the instruction either. To make matters worse, the text-to-speech quality wasn’t as good as competitive devices. Sometimes it just says silly things like “turn right on route 3-ahh” instead of “3 A”. One neat feature though was a setting where you can have it announce both the route number and the name of the road. Often both types of signage are not displayed so you might not know that Main Street was also Route 101. This was a nice touch and a good option to include.
There is also an option to warn you if you are going over the speed limit. Other GPS devices allow you to specify a certain “grace” period of a certain amount of miles per hour or percentage over the limit. The LG GPS will warn you if you are just a little bit over. I found one street where the posted limit was different than what the map on the LG thought it was and it keeps reminding you every few seconds “You’re over the speed limit!” every few seconds.
Finally, a night mode does exist, but you must change the setting manually yourself.
Extras
The LN-735 does include an MP3 music player, but note that it doesn’t include a headphone jack! So unlike other devices like the Nuvi you can’t load some music, grab your headphones, and stick it in your pocket like a traditional MP3 player. And with the speaker quality as poor as it is I wouldn’t purchase this device over another because of the MP3 player. The MP3 player functions as a separate application and is turned off in order to get back to the navigation application.
There is a tutorial program that operates on the device and shows you basic operation of different functions. However in places the tutorial itself showed inaccurate instructions such as asking you to tap a button called actions and the associated graphic doesn’t show a button called actions! instead there is a button highlighted called ‘options’.
Warranty
I also was a little surprised reading the warranty information. The cover parts for one year like most other manufacturers, but only offer labor for 90 days. So if something breaks between 90 days and one year it looks like they will pay for any parts, but you pay for the labor involved in the repair.
Purchasing Advice
The GPS market is getting fierce, and for a company even of LG’s size to make a splash they need to do so with a device that can at least match the established competition. Unfortunately LG has fallen short with this line of GPS devices. The LN735 doesn’t offer any big features that would cause me to pick it over devices it competes directly against such as the Garmin Nuvi 350 and TomTom ONE.
Despite the same size screen the LN735 is less portable, has a lower quality screen, has an underpowered speaker, and the only real feature bonus it has is the Multistop Planner.
| Store | Rating | Best Prices |
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Compare all prices on the LG LN735 Potable / Handheld GPS ranging from $149.97 to $199.00. | ||
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Was not happy I can’t connect to my laptop and use 3rd party software like streets and trips or mappoint
To be fair, you can’t do that with most any auto GPS.
Compared to other makers, this one is mediocre to say the best.
1. No automatic Day/Night display switching.
2. Touchscreen is insensitive and capricious.
3. Inaccurate map. I went to downtown Montreal, QC and it tried to direct me into one-way streets against the traffic on a few occasions.
4. Don’t trust its Gas Stations Listing! Running out of gas at Kingston, ON almost left me in the middle of nowhere without gas.
5. Don’t trust your speed reading, either! What it shows is -6 clicks to your actual speed. I was pulled over by a cop for doing 26 clicks on top of the limit driving 120km/hr, which I might be able to find an excuse for.
6. About 25 min battery life renders the Pedestrian mode useless.
For xmas I got both the LG LN735 and the Garmin Nuvi 650. Obviously I will be returning one but would like to know which model I should keep. Which is the better model? I am new to the GPS world and this is more of a toy then a tool for me as i do not travel often. So which is the better bang for the buck, considering the nuvi cost more (twice as much) and will thus mean more money in my pocket upon return.
Keep the 650.
I bought my dad an LG LN735 but he had already purchased Garmin Nuvi 250W. These are our first GPS device basically. I don’t know about LG but Garmin has been in this industry for a while. One of them gotz to go. I am not a heavy traveller but if this thing is reliable then I might plan a trip or so. Can’t decide whether I should get rid of LN735 or Nuvi 250W. I appreciate any feedback related to this. Thnx
I received the LN735 as a gift for Xmas. It says it has Hawaii and Puerto Rico installed already, the mapping program confirms that it is installed on the system, but I cannot find/access it. When you list all the states/provinces, it’s not there. Can anyone assist please. Thx
I acquired my LN 735 via a “rewards program”. Sure glad I didn’t pay real money for it! It’s interesting enough, but things like no headphone jack, inability to play music while using navigation and awkward street address naming conventions are just a few things that irk me. But it will do what I need it to do… help find baseball stadiums, hockey rinks, soccer fields, shopping malls, hotels, Starbucks and other helpful POI’s. Sure cuts down on arguing with family members “where is it” and “how long til we get there” activities. It’s not sophisticated… but imagine what people would have given to have one of these little puppies about 20 years ago!
How do I update the maps on this model?
And i know it says it has TTS, but.. i don’t think mine says any of the street names.. it just tells me to turn here and in this distance…
maybe mine is faulty? I picked mine up used.
Dave, Mine came with a DVD with the maps on it if I needed to reload them and a USB cable to make those updates/changes. I have tried the map reload and it works fine on mine. I have Canada, USA, Hawaii and Puerto Rico preloaded and on the CD for reloading if necessary. FYI
Mark, thanks for the reply, does it work for updating new roads too?
Dave, I only have the CD that came with the system when I got it. I would like to know if there is any updates etc. that you or anyone else knows of on line or to be purchased. I did find out to-day that mine sumbbles on the word “Avenue”, and a couple of roads that were build last year her at home are not on it. I know I can download updates with the usb cable that came with it, if there are any out there.
But If I’ll buy a Ln735 in America and than I have to come back to Italy, can I install software and maps for Italy?
Thank you.
dave does the tts work now cause i have the same thing doesn’t say the street names?
Updating the maps:
I called LG and they said, “This unit (LG LN735) is self-contained and CANNOT be updated to new maps. The maps CD that comes with the unit is all what will be available to you”. very sad.
Can somebody do some research such as, getting a newer version of maps and try installing on it, etc. I have ordered LG735, but have not received it yet.
Bill, i don’t have text to speech working… which i actually didn’t even know ours had it.
Hmm, cannot be updated.. maybe we should all invest into another gps.
how can i install maps of the usa in my lg model # ln500 gps. i have the maps from spain in them.thank you.
Hey, bought this a while ago.
Haven’t looked into it much, but the manual wasn’t very detailed in terms of battery charging. Not sure if it’s only my unit, but the battery seems to only charge when the unit is ‘ON’. Meaning screen is bright with image, etc. I can’t seem to fully charge this GPS either, always stays at around 2/3 bars. The unit also does not charge when it is in standby mode with the switch ‘ON’. For that matter, it doesn’t charge when it is switched ‘OFF’. Am I doing anything wrong, or is my unit defective? You’d figure that you could charge the unit without keeping it on 24/7 while plugged into the wall (like a cellphone)?
Dave - You will have to check with LG and see what they offer. Last I checked they were not offering much additional mapping.
Dan - I’m not sure, you might want to call LG on that one. Mine seems to charge when it is off but there doesn’t appear to be any external indication of such.
Thanks for your reply tim.
There is no external indication of it charging on mine as well, which baffles me to no end. How do you charge your unit? Do you charge it with the unit switched to power ‘ON’ mode, but while it is in the power saving mode (as in the unit will come on when you push the menu button)?
I tried charging it leaving overnight with the unit switched to ‘OFF’, but to no avail. It sucks because I can only use this unit for about 1~2 hours before requiring a charge. And my car does not have room for the charger, my cigarette lighter is being used.
I charge it from the car charger and/or from an inverter to charge inside.
Here’s a response I received just from LG -
We appreciate your interest in this navigator device. Mapping updates, when available, are going to be posted on our website: either at http://us.lge.com, or at http://us.lgservice.com. At this time, these updates are not yet available. Keep watch on our websites for these updates to be added.
The maps available from our site, for this unit, will cover the United States and Canada only. Maps for other countries will only be available on the LG websites of those countries. You may visit http://www.lge.com, and from there, be directed to any of our other, international subsidiaries.
At this time, we cannot say whether or not the updates would be available at no cost for new purchases.
If you have other questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us again either via email, or by calling our customer service division at 800-243-0000 at your convenience.
Hi:LG LN735 is quite limited. Also. won’t fully charge, no headphone jack, cannot update maps etc. I think LG should provide current mapping at no charge based on when item was purchased or at least one free update. I got my device about a month ago and it’s at least 12 to 24 mos behind current. Personally, I would not buy this manufacturer product again based on the shortcomings. Also, I’ll certainly check out other devices careully BEFORE next purchase. Sadly, it’s comforting to hear others have same negative issues with this unit. I assumed too much.
I dont know, I drive for a living and the LG735 can be very frustrating at times. Most of the time it can get you close, but not to the front door of your destination. If you dont know your streets it can get you turned around easily. I find alot of times it’s telling me to turn one way and I know for a fact it’s in the opposite direction. It seems to know how to find streets but not street numbers. On a few occations it’s led me more than a couple of miles from my destination. (Right street, wrong block)I may trade up to something better. It would be nice to go online and update it too. (New housing developement, forget finding it.)
I received the ln735 as a Anniversary gift. Does anyone know any way to make the unit any louder (besides the volume buttons)? I can hardly hear it in the car & and cannot listen to the radio while i’m using the LG. thank you, john h
My LN735 was a peice of junk. I got it back in september I believe as a gift. We used it on two 8 hour + trips and both times the unit would randomly just go nutz and think we were in a completely different place then we were. It was the strangest thing. It was showing us physically in the wrong place and the routing was wierd. A hard reset had to be performed to get the unit functioning correctly again. We only had this problem on long trips.
Batter life is absolutly horrendous and as far as I can tell can only be charged while it’s turned on.
In mid december the LCD just stopped working. I probably could have gotten it fixed but decided I’d just take the loss and bought a Navigon 2100 that I absolutly love.
Let’s not forget the fact that LG has been telling customers since October than an update will be out next month.
I picked one up open box a week ago and it has worked fine for me so far. On the charging issue mine charge well and rather quickly tuned on or off while charging seems to makes no difference.
I had a chat with customer support and even though they have been most pleasant, they have no idea as when the map update will be released but they have confirmed a charge will be applied, which in my case exceed the price paid for the unit. I have complained that maps on a unit bought in 2008 are very much outdated and that at least one free update would be fair. I was told I would be contacted by LG officials. I will give them another week, and in case of no reply I shall return it and get something else
LG Customer Inquiry
David Herbert dherbert@lge.com
Monday, April 28, 2008 4:09:53 PM
———–Reply to Customer Enquiry————
Hello.
We are launching our 2008 models in June. With this launch, we will start the upgrade service. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT THIS IS NOT A FREE UPGRADE. Customers will contact customer service and they will be transferred to Parts where they will make payments with their credit card. There will not be any maps made available for countries that are not already included with the unit.
Regards David Herbert LG Canada
———–Original Customer Inquiry————
Received Date : 4/28/2008 12:03:57
The type of inquiry : Other
Product/Model No. : Navigation / 735
Map Updates
Where and how can I obtain map updates for my LG Navigator LN-735. My unit was purchased in June 2007 and the area where I live (developed in 2004) doesn’t show on the maps, suggesting they’re somewhat outdated already.
Thanks.
I am quite happy with my LG735, had borrowed a friends TOMTOM and decided to buy one foe myself. I choose the LG735. The only thing that I didn’t like was the Speed Warning, you should be able to set alarm announcement to your selected speed limits. Also when planning a trip remember that “Shortest” can take to off paved roads. “Fastest” is the preferred setting.
Someone found a map update for the GPS LG LN-735? If yes give me the web site. Thanks
New model LN-835 just came out, any one has a map update for LN-735? Thanks
Got mine with a promation from Rosas ya bought a 50″ plasma and got this unit well, after figuring out how it works it worked well took us 750 miles away from home ok then it just stopped working now i have to send it back with a 69.00$ money order to have it fixed dont know if i should?
Here’s a response I received from LG -
Thank you for your email regarding this navigation unit. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing. The model LN735 is a year old model. An update for this unit is currently available through our parts department. This update, unfortunately, will not be without charge. Please call 1-888-393-6484, Monday through Saturday from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, for availability and ordering information on remotes, owners’ manuals, and parts. Please have the Model Number of your product available. You may also write: LG/Zenith Parts Department P.O. Box 240007 201 James Record Rd. Bldg. # 3 Huntsville, AL 35824 If you have other questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us again either via email, or by calling our customer service division at 800-243-0000 at your convenience. Neil E Electronic Correspondence Executive (ECE) LG Electronics USA 800-243-0000