The South Koreans love their gadgets. Their mobile phones are the most advanced in the world, with local companies Samsung and LG (the world’s number 2 and number 4 mobile manufacturers, respectively) regularly releasing super-sophisticated phones for the Korean market only.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Korean GPS devices are just as advanced. In fact, they come with so many features that they actually start to blur the boundaries of what a GPS device actually is.

Take this, the HyON Xent X3, for example. It’s a GPD device that also comes with mobile TV and can play MP3 and videos. So is it a GPS with multimedia features, or a Personal Media Player with GPS?

More details after the jump.


Looking at what comes with the Xent X3, it’s pretty obvious that the device is designed primarily as a GPS device. It’s the car mounting bracket that gives the game away, but it also comes with full navigational software, rather than just a few map-like bits and pieces tacked on, so it’s definitely meant as a full featured GPS unit.

As such, the Xent X3 is one pretty well-specced GPS device, given what it else it can do. The user interface looks clean and enticing, with large icons all rendered on a large 7″ screen. Powering the device is a 500MHz alchemy processor, with 128MB of SDRAM and support for SD card memory thrown in as well.

The Xent X3 can display video rendered in Divx, Xvid, WMV9, MPEG4, and MPEG2 formats, and play MP3 files as well. The mobile TV also looks good, using T-DMB to receive the TV signals, and should help you while away the boredom when stuck in a traffic jam.

It even comes with a remote control, which is an interesting extra, given that the unit will generally be positioned just 6 inches from your nose on the windscreen of your car! Why would you need a remote control for the device? You’re not going to use it in the car (unless you want your passengers suddenly switching to the latest episode of Neighbours when you’re trying to navigate!) and the unit is too small to require a remote control if you take it out of the car!

Remote control aside, the HyON Xent X3 looks great, comes with a tonne of features, but unfortunately is available in Korea only.

[Source: PMPInside via Navigadget]