10. Multimedia Capabilities

Figure 45: Accessing the 810's Multimedia Functions

One of the stronger areas of the 810 is its versatile multimedia capabilities. From the Main Menu you can select Music, Photos, or Videos.

Figure 46: Music Menu

Music can be browsed by artist, song title, folder, album title, genre, or a saved playlist can be loaded.

Figure 47: Music Playback

Basic playback option worked reliably and quickly, such as pause, shuffle, and fast-forward/rewind. You can navigate up and down during playback to look for a particular song, tapping a song to start playback. The 810's music player supports MP3, AAC, and WMA audio formats.

When listening to music while navigating to an address, the unit displays upcoming turn information at the bottom of the screen (tapping on that upcoming turn displays the full map, and tapping the same area again returns you to the music playback screen).

Using the 810's music player worked nicely when not in navigation mode. Unfortunately, things weren't so smooth when trying to listen to music while navigating: on more than one occasion the unit froze up for a few seconds during playback while navigating. Sometimes it played well, and other times it would freeze up. Playing the same music files when not in navigation mode worked fine, but things seemed unreliable while trying to navigate.

Figure 48: Photos

Photo playback is quite simple and the screen makes the pictures look decent. When you first enter the photo menu, you are given folder and thumbnail views. Clicking any of the thumbnails will bring the photo up into a playback view.

Figure 49: Photo Playback

Clicking the photo itself will expand it to full screen. Clicking the play button at the bottom will expand the picture to full size and will play all the photos as a slideshow. Left and right arrows on either side of the photo make it possible to scroll through the photos.

The photo viewer can display JPEG, BMP and GIF photo formats up to 4096 x 3072 pixels. Other than that, there isn't much else to say about the photos. It works and is a nice extra feature. Nothing to write home about, but could come in handy for showing photos to family members while on vacation, for example.

Figure 50: Video

Video playback is very basic as well. You just choose the file you want to play and tap it. Note that video playback is not possible while navigating.

Figure 51: Video Playback

When you get into the video, it will instantly jump to full screen. If you click on the video, it will pause and the status bar will display at the bottom. The player is pretty basic, but it plays fairly well. It is a little washed out for video, but it does work.

The video player can play video in MPEG 4 (AVI) and H.264 video formats.