Alpine is among the best-known names on the car audio accessories' market, launching a very large number of such products over the past couple of years. However, the company has also tried to get a foothold on the GPS portable navigation devices' (PNDs) market, and launched back in August 2008 the PND-K3 Portable Navigation System, a device which offers quite a wide range of features, but, unfortunately, nothing that really stands out from a crowd.



The company doesn't provide any info regarding the GPS chipset or the K3's processor, but does inform us that the PND supports 20-channel parallel reception and offers a very wide range of navigation options, as for example Route Guidance Setup, Voice Prompts, Arrival Time, Auto-Sort Nearest Destination, Street Name Voice Guidance, Database Smart Key Filtering, etc.



Additionally, users can view the maps in various modes (North up, heading up, 3D) and can even set the device to display up to 8 POIs in real-time (out of over 6 million available). Furthermore, they can even “customize” the way in which they view the menus and maps, being able to choose out of the 8 available color schemes.



The display is also pretty standard, since we're dealing with a 4.3-inch touch screen TFT LCD screen, which offers users a 480 x 272 pixels resolution and a LED backlighting system. The connectivity options aren't particularly impressive, either, since we're only dealing with Bluetooth, USB interface and an SD card slot, which supports memory cards up to 4 GB. The Bluetooth module, however, does support an extensive array of functions, since it can double (quite successfully) as a handsfree system.



The PND-K3 sells for around 550 US dollars, which is a rather high price point, given the device's features, or, more importantly, lack thereof.