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303 of 308 humans found the following review helpful.
Is this the best GPS?
By Comdet
I've been using GPS schemes for various years, and I'm always asked "what's the best GPS?" Unfortunately, that's not an easy question to answer. Just like there's no "best" car for everyone, there's no such thing as the "best" GPS.
49 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Needs work, aid and perchance galore re-engineering.
By Michael P. Deslippe
Well, I am not the GPS buff a lot of the reviewers seem to be, so you'll get this review from a regular guy. My only former experience with GPS is renting a Garmin 330 with a rental car twice. My wife hated the Garmin, I liked it, but I was awe struck by the tecno-factor. So we went looking on-line to see what was available. We purchased this unit quintessentially because it met my wife's criteria. She loved that it spoke street names and not just "turn right", "turn left". She also like that it was loaded with the AAA data. We have been AAA members for more than 35 years, so this feature appealed to us. If you are not a AAA member, then any GPS that has POI's is in all probability adequate for the purpose for you. She also demanded one feature - she hates highways and wanted something that would provide the shortest distance without using highways. This was the only unit that did that as portion of a standard routine. For everyone else it was either not possible or required broad navigation to get to the screens where you could program it to use that criteria.
My experiences therefore far have been luke warm. When picking "shortest distance", it doesn't always pick the shortest distance, even though it was programmed with the roads that were shorter than the map it gave me. On the other hand, it went to some extremes that were not reasonable to get the shortest distance such as having me take an expressway off-ramp and on-ramp because they went in a straight line while staying on the expressway made a curve around the exit area that probably added 100 feet to the trip. It likewise had me taking miniature turns in little towns, also just to save a few feet. All in all, the shortest route was very hard on driving and gas and not always right. To make matters worse, the unit out of the box would crash constantly when you picked the "shortest" route. All other choices worked fine. I went online and got five software updates and the crashing problem disappeared. However, the most recent maps for this unit are the 3rd quarter of 2006, so there are a lot of things not on there. We missed various streets in Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and Southern California because they were not yet programmed into the GPS even altho the streets were at least a year old.
The unit likewise suffers from overly menu-driven programming. Things ought to be remembered from time-to-time so you may just reuse popular data. Sometimes this works and now and again it doesn't - at least not intuitively. For example, when you program your "home", it takes eight dissimilar menus to select it as the place you want to go. Just to add it to the database took assorted minutes of typing in information. I assumed I could park in my driveway, click on something that said "add current location", give it a name and be done. That doesn't happen. When you are searching by categories and such, it doesn't have a paging menu. If ten items are listed and you want to scroll, you have to do it one item at a time; for example, you type in Columbus because you want to go to Columbus Ohio. You get 12 hits, Columbus, Ohio being number 9 on page two since they won't all fit on one screen, and you have to down arrow nine times to get to it. I would have liked to hit next page and down arrow once or twice to get to it. These may sound petty, but when you are programming and driving this is a distraction (and I don't inevitably mean programming while moving, just pulling over and taking this kind of time is annoying).
Finally, I am sending the unit back because the hardware is defective. The clip (called the cradle) that attaches the GPS to the holder doesn't fit the unit. It just keeps falling off. All the experience you have read above came from having the unit sit on my lap while I tried it out.
It likewise gives odd changes and distances from point-to-point. This is just an sentiment because it isn't wrong, but let's say you are going twenty miles on an expressway before you get off. The unit doesn't say you are going twenty miles. It says you are going six mile, then seven miles, then seven miles. Each distance is when you cross a major highway or a region line. It is not applicable data for any reason I may grasp. It knows where I am going and will have to just count down for me.
My last comment is a feature recommendation that ought to be considered. The trip computer is very fixed in the data it provides. When I used the garmin, I could touch one button and a thing popped up that looked like an automotive dashboard that told me speed, ETA, miles to go, miles traveled, all sorts of good data regarding what happened, what is happening and what is yet to happen. It was very thorough, including top speed this trip, intermediate speed, time stopped, etc. The trip computer on this unit says intermediate speed, distance, elapsed time and that's in regards to it - plus it takes four menus to get to the selective information - again, not utile if you want to track when and where you are going and how your progress is doing.
I gave it a three because after the software fixes, it will get you where you want to go, but it is not worth the differential we salaried amid it and the newer versions from Garmin. Again, that's a judgment call on my part, but I employed the 320 and 330 and they now have the 350 and 360, or if you want the 650, 660 and 670 whose feature set is mainly expanded from the one I original experienced.
All in all, unless you are genuinely tied to user simplicity, I wouldn't commend this unit.
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