Like the TomTom system for Palm, the Dell's program shows a colorful map, and your movement on it. You can either view things in two dimensions, looking straight down at the map, or three dimensions, a true bird's eye view. It calls out upcoming turns in a woman's voice through the Pocket PC's built-in speaker — she has a nice Irish lilt — and can calculate routes taking into consideration detours or stopovers you'd like to make.

I found Dell's system, developed by Navteq, exceptionally good at certain things: when you pass a turn you're supposed to make, it recalculates your route instantly, and if it can see a useful route ahead, it lets you continue on rather than making you double back. It also presents many "points of interest," so you can find restaurants (listed by style and ethnicity), parks, hotels and hospitals. It does lose a few points by burying gas stations under the heading "Transport," since gas stations are so crucial to the wandering driver they should have their own heading.

The Dell system makes accommodations for users who may not have an extra memory card to spare. During set-up, you can pick a city and then identify a radius around it. A complete 25-mile-radius map of a decent-sized city like Indianapolis — with points of interest — only takes up 7 MB, and has a good chance of fitting into the spare on-board memory of your Pocket PC. A 50-mile radius map of New York is 33MB.

This is great for roadtrippers who know roughly where they're going but want help when they get there. The trouble is that if you're driving long distances and want turn-by-turn instructions the whole way, you're going to have to buy a big memory card (256MB or 512MB). There's no slimmed-down "major highways" map. You either pick cities, or stitch together whole states. New York and Pennsylvania combined exceed the storage on a 128MB card.

When you get the kit — which comes with a well-designed windshield-mounted holster, the GPS receiver module itself and a power plug for both devices — you will have to make sure your Pocket PC's backlight stays on when its plugged into a power source, or else your map will vanish every few minutes. (You do this in the Brightness setting, under "External Power".) Also, though the Dell Axim X30 can switch to a widescreen "landscape" view, ideal for navigation, the current version of the software doesn't support this. Dell assures me that a future version will support it.