How do you like your < $150 aftermarket GPS unit?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Yep. When I’m on the NJ Turnpike, at 2 miles from my exit, my GPS will say “Please move to the right lane in 1 mile.” Then, at 1 mile away, it’ll say “Please take the exit 6 in 1 mile.” And as I approach the exit “Please take the exit 6 in half a mile…Please take the exit 6 in a quarter mile…Now take exit 6.”

On local roads it’ll give directions in smaller distance increments, such as “Please make a right turn at Hornberger Avenue in 300 yards…Please make a right turn at Hornberger Avenue in 100 yards…Now make a right turn.”

ETA: I never look at my GPS, which is in my phone, when I’m driving. It’s voice activated, so all I have to do is speak the address.

22

I’ve had a Tom Tom Go somethingorother for about 5 years and it’s basic but great. I leave it on for most journeys, even if I’m not following a route, since it also has a hands-free function for my phone. The sound quality for that isn’t great, but I’d rather keep phone calls whilst I’m driving to short and necessary anyway, so it suits me.

It seems that most people who have answered use the voice instructions - I turn those off, they irritate me. I just have the pictorial instructions so I can check them and ignore them when I feel like it. I also like the time-to-destination feature, which in mine is surprisingly accurate. My husband has a Jaguar with an inbuilt satnav and it’s more stupid than my cheapy standalone in many ways - including the poor estimating of duration it gives.

I suppose that since I want the picture not the voice, that may help to explain why I’d never think of using my phone instead, although I do use that for walking directions sometimes.

23

I have TomTom on an old Dell Axim PDA.

Absolutely the best gadget I own. Used in combination with Google Maps to plan routes, it means we never get lost any more. No more arguments with the wife about rubbish directions, no drama when you miss a turn. And when there’s a traffic jam it’ll take you around it with no fuss.

I also like to have all the maps stored locally - on my BlackBerry the map data is downloaded as you go, which means any time your outside network coverage your maps stop working (this seems such a major design flaw I’m amazed there’s no local-storage option).

I prefer to use the top-down (i.e. 2D) map in portrait mode, so I get a general sense of what’s coming up, rather than needing the as-you-go 3D maps.

24

I love all my Garmin units. I have a 1490 for the car, a 60csx for geocaching ( replacing my beloved veteran eTrex Vista which is now a backup) and a yellow eTrex for jogging and the bike.

25

My Magellan Maestro lasted a few years, but the touch screen went bad. I have tried several times to use the calibration tool, but it seems to go into an infinite loop.

I have not used my Garmin nüvi enough to have a strong opinion of it. So far it seems to do the job, but I have only done a small test with it.

26

Garmin Nuvi over Tom Tom. It’s considerably faster and more accurate in my experience, over two continents and six years.

27

I’ve got a garmin Nuvi 200 which I got about 3 years ago. I don’t have a smart phone so I enjoy the garmin. THe only problem is that when I was in San Diego it took 10+ minutes for it to detect satellites, and I have heard other problems with losing satellite signals in larger cities, esp around large buildings or in tunnels.

Aside from that, it works fairly well. But it can’t tell 1 way from 2 way streets, doesn’t get construction updates, doesn’t give traffic info, and about 10-15% of hte time it gives the wrong directions. But it was worth it as a GPS device because it is better than using a map.

My brother has a 265T, which is much better when you live in an area with traffic congestion.

28

I have a Magellan 2136 with lifetime traffic & map updates and I like it a lot. I use it to find suggestions for restaurants and stores, including those in my area I have ignored in the past. One thing I’ve learned the hard way is for long routes, you have to sanity check it and/or break the route down into shorter segments, otherwise it can take you pretty far out of the way…seems to need some refinement in that regard. I am amazed they can store all that map database information for the entire U.S. in the relatively small memory chip(s).

29

FYI, the Mapquest app is free and has spoken directions.

30

I love my lower model Garmin Nuvi (not sure of the exact model). I don’t have a smart phone but I would still want a dedicated GPS unit even if I did. It mounts perfectly so you can see it as well as you can your rear-view mirror even in strong sunlight. I leave mine on all the time as well because I like to see what I am passing that I may not know about. Mine has given me incorrect directions before but in a minor way. You can’t ever truly be lost if you have one. It has a map that you zoom in on and navigate manually if you need to. It has also showed me a few times that the best way to get from one place to another wasn’t the way that I thought even in areas that I know well. Standalone GPS units are really good value for the money. I am partial to the Garmin Nuvi line like many others are.

31

I bought a Tomtom XL350T about a month ago. It was normally a $150 unit but they were discontinuing it, so they were selling off the remaining ones for $80.

I’ve never had or used a GPS before, so I don’t have any experience other than with this one unit. So I don’t know how typical my experience is.

It works and I have found it useful. But it undeniably has problems. The controls are poorly designed. It’s a touch screen and the sensitivity is terrible. Sometimes it “double clicks” and other times it doesn’t register a touch. The keyboard is tiny and it’s hard to punch the right buttons unless you are very careful.

There have been several occasions when it’s shut itself off while I was driving and other times when it’s frozen itself. I’ve had times when it’s given me one direction verbally while the screen is showing me the opposite direction. I’ve seen it ignore the existence of roads. And a couple of times, it’s simply got lost and given me directions that have no bearing on reality.

If any of these problems occur, you have to go through a bunch of steps to get it back to where it should be. Which, with the control issues I mentioned above, is definitely something you shouldn’t be doing while driving in traffic.

32

But you will find, once you do get a smart phone, that it can do everything, and I mean everything a standalone unit can, including being mounted on the dash.

Others have stated that they have to pay extra for GPS functionality in their phones. Perhaps that’s the way it is for an iPhone, or perhaps the carrier, but for my Droid X on Verizon there is no extra charge for navigation.

After 6 months of constant use (I click my phone into the dash-mounted dock whenever I get into the car) I find that it is the most accurate GPS device I’ve ever used. I’ve never gotten bad directions. My wife’s old Mio is pretty good. Android Navigation is very good.

The other negative with my wife’s old Mio unit is we invariably had to wait at least a minute for it to “lock-on” to a satellite signal. It’s instantaneous, or it’s as close to instantaneous as to be a non-issue, on my Droid X.

You may believe now, as I did before getting my Droid X and my wife’s Incredible, that you’d still keep and use a separate GPS unit, but once you have a multifunction device that does all the things the dedicated devices do, and better, it’ll be difficult not to become ONE OF US. :slight_smile:

Seriously, my wife’s Incredible is a better music player/manager than her iPod Touch, a better GPS than her Mio, a better addressbook than her old PDA, a better phone than her old non-smart phone, a better camera than her old Canon Digital, a better video camera than her old JVC Camcorder, a better email client than, oh wait, she never had mobile email before, a better internet browsing experience than, oh, that’s right, she could never browse the web on the go before. With the included ability to use voice commands, and voice to text for emails and text messaging, it couldn’t have been named more appropriately as it is freaking Incredible. :slight_smile:

Like many of you, I was a standalone GPS guy at one time also, but they simply don’t hold up, in my experience, to the convenience of having one integrated into a smart phone.

33

I like to have a good idea of where I’m going so I either carry a map or print out maps to use in addition to the GPS. But as far as wandering around goes, a GPS doesn’t care where your origin point it. A driver can wander all over and the GPS just keeps recalculating the route.

One feature I like about my GPS is that it allows the use of zip codes for programing the address. Very handy if you can’t spell some horribly long city name. After that, it’s just a heads up display that tells me how far the next turn is. What I would like is a unit that doesn’t cost me as much to update the database as the unit costs. I pay less than half the cost for updates to my aviation GPS. These companies are pissing away an easy sale considering it’s all electronic.

What I would like is the ability to quickly pull up emergency services on the GPS. I have to wade through endless screens to find this information.

34

Mine is a Garmin GPSMAP 76CSx. Cost a little more than 150 clams, but I’m an avid geocacher and it is absolutely wonderful for that.