Most helpful client reviews
85 of 85 persons found the following review helpful.
Dont leave home without it.
By David Lasnick
Let's be up front when it comes to this. Maps, GPS, directions from the guy on the street, you're going to ultimately get lost driving in a alien country where you don't speak the language. That being said I may not adequately express the joy and lack of tension I felt driving in Tuscany while we had our Garmin City Navigator of Italy and Greece. The criticisms brought up in Irina's review just prior to this one are all true, but in the end, so what. On those occasions where the info did not have the new off ramp or entrance to the I22 or the creation of the new roundabout in Siena you merely press detour and in regarding 5 seconds the new route is calculated. For me the beauty of this product was that in the end I knew it would get me there. Maybe it didn't seem to be the best route, but I could surely not have done better with a map and my wife calling out directions. The only thing I would be conscious of is the old - rubbish in rubbish out - advice. How you get there will be determined to a great extent on how precise your end emplacement address is. If you are going to Florence but don't know the address of the parking garage, there is only so much the Garmin may do for you. (Been there, done that.) A couple of hints. 1. When in doubt, zoom out on the map, click on the emplacement you are headed to and save. Some locatings just don't appear in the address list no matter how galore times you try to type in the name. I found this was ofttimes due to my misunderstanding of how towns, cities, and streets were categorized. That being said once I found the emplacement on the map I was ordinarily given the proper name and was competent to find it in the data base; 2. The "attractions" section has a wondrous supply of information, including parking garages in the cities - found that one out too late; 3. If you are lost or get to an unidentified one way street, be quick with the detour button (menu - detour), it will save you a lot of time; 4. If you are taking a long drive, double check. Plot the route on the Garmin, then zoom out and use the touch screen to drag the map from beginning to end. Make sure that you and the GPS are in agreement as to where you are going. Had that problem going to the Coast. We were with regards to 10 minutes away and the GPS took us up a mountain - as my wife said, this doesn't look like the beach. My fault since I had employed the defective ending address so therefore, finally; 5. Bring a map - what may I say.
47 of 49 persons found the following review helpful.
Even if you buy this, still have with you a regular map!
By Irina
Oddly, the Product Details do not incorporate a very important piece of information: the map version. I suspect this Product is the same "CN Europe NT Italy and Greece Version 9" map that was available last year on just SD card (but not microSD). If so, I have a couple of remarks when it comes to it.
My opinion, based on our 2007 trip to Tuscany, is: it surely is a utile product but you cannot always rely on it. Even if you have this product and a GPS with you, still take along a good road atlas (such as Atlante Stradale d'Italia) for international route planning, and, wherever you plan to stay or visit more than once, always undertake to get a elaborated local map.
Now a heap of peculiar examples:
The V9 map was already noticeably obsolete in 2007. It was missing a good deal of new rotaries and ramps and a good deal of newly build highway extents. Once we missed our exit because of that.
Some places of interest were located incorrectly on the map. E.g. the railroad station in Poggibonsi, Tuscany, is located on the map on the faulty side of the tracks. The GPS brought us to a place from where there was no access to the station, no parking etc. When we realized what happened and manually directed the GPS to take us to the spot on the opposite side of the tracks, the GPS navigated us to a tunnel that we could not even enter because it was one way (the wrong way for us). Luckily, we had a local map that we applied to find another railroad crossing! (I guess I could try the GPS "Detour" button and may be that would work out, but at the time I was just fed up with it!)
I could list galore other annoying quirks a good deal of of which could be attributed to the map data (which I guess is produced by NAVTEQ) and a lot of to the Garmin navigation system, but that would not be suitable for this brief review.
And, of course, there were a lot of cases when everything worked flawlessly and the product was of outstanding help.
14 of 15 humans found the following review helpful.
Worth each penny I salaried and then some....
By Richard E. George
Just returned from a two week driving trip by way of northern Italy and employed my Garmin NUVI 350 with the SM card for Italy - I would have been exceedingly frustrated if I did not have this navigational device with me each time we entered one of the major cities...It took us to each hotel (or other attraction we were attempting to locate) even when we missed turns etc...I would highly commend this to any person unfamiliar with driving in Italy - it's worth the $99 and more..
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