I have a basic garmin gps I use for hiking navigation in bad weather. It’s just a supplement to the map and compass, lest I offend any purists, but it’s a great shortcut, saves you counting paces etc. Even in good weather, the altitude measurement is useful in helping you judge your effort, telling you far you are from the top of the hill.
A lot of the functionality is extraneous for me, I just need the grid reference plus 1 or 2 other numbers such as altitude and maybe distance travelled. I’ve wondered if I could get this on my phone? I’m not sure if phone gps depends on the cell phone signal, which would be very intermittent in the hills, or whether it works off the satellite gps signal. Anyone know?
I didn’t like the look of the unit on the windshield, so we turned the suction cup arm around so the round part is facing down and put it in the cup holder. Our car has a cup holder that comes out from the dash (like the old ashtrays), so we can snug it in. It’s not in direct view, but the voice annoucements keep us on track. One other benefit is that it is within easy reach to replay a missed turn since it is near the other controls (radio, A/C, etc).
The suction cup disintigrated on my aunts GPS and we did the same thing with hers…and it seems to work well for her too.
I use a Magellan at work, and I love it for the most part. It has its own weird road fetishes. A couple of times it’s wanted me to cut through side streets rather than stay on the main road. There’s one place where it insists I go through a residential neighborhood, making four or five extra turns, when staying on the main road would actually be quicker.
I don’t have a dash cup holder, so I think that would make it too far from the windows and the satellite wouldn’t track it. I just need to keep the windows clean. I’m not a smoker, but every so often you need to clean the windows to make the suction cup stick.
The Nuvi does not seem to allow alternative voices/instructions, which is a real shame. I believe that the TomTom does allow this, and you can buy a John Cleese instruction set.
I also suspect that you could make a lot of money with a business that allows a wife to record custom satnav instructions for her husband (or vice versa)…
Oh, and I love my Nuvi - saves a great deal of hassle and arguments and getting lost-ish (I never get really lost, honest).
You know it’s a great GPS when the biggest complaint is that you can’t add custom voices I would think that it would be prohibitively complex for the average person to have to record enough phonemes to load up a voice profile. However, there was a thread on that topic some time back and I think it is possible to load alternative files but I don’t think Garmin markets any.
My Garmin offers different languages, so when you get tired of the one you can change to the British bitch for a while, and then change to the German woman. I understand the more expensive ones offer celebrity voices, so you can get a NASCAR driver telling you where to turn. I’d love to have a Three Stooges voice telling me I screwed up. “Oh, a wise guy, eh?” Or instead of that stupid “recalculating,” “That’s another fine mess . . .”
I *had * a nuvi and I *loved * it. Yesterday morning I entered my van, which was parked in my driveway, to find it had been stolen. I think I must have left the car unlocked. I couldn’t believe that the one night I forgot to lock the car was the one night that some bastard was looking to steal GPS units. :mad:
Love my Garmin Nuvi. However, the factory-intalled GPS in my mother-in-law’s Lexus is really pretty good. We’ve driven some places using both, and I could see the merits of its approach.
I have experienced a few of the nuvi glitches mentioned above. On several occasions, the thing has completely panicked when I’ve missed a turn, and begun repeating the direction to make a U-turn repeatedly. It makes me wonder what it thinks is ahead–the end of the world? A sinkhole? Godzilla?
I don’t use it around town because I’ve been driving it unassisted for more than a quarter century now. I wouldn’t even consider a trip to Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio without it though.
I haven’t gotten annoyed with ‘recalculating’, but I can see where it could get that way.
I had it try to take me from work to home when I first got it and that would have been a disaster for someone who didn’t know the area.
Our main city post office is situated in the middle of the central city avenue with the road splitting and looping around it. The first major error was when it was telling me to drive straight through the middle. USPS would not have been amused.
After overcoming that hurdle there is a major train hub and switching yard on the other side of down town. Had I followed instructions I would have wound up somewhere in the middle of the switchyard. Which is rather odd since there isn’t even a road where it was directing me.
After circumventing that it did get me to the road I live on. Whereupon Garmin informed me that ‘home’ was about three miles short of where I had thought I lived. In the middle of a creek. :eek:
I haven’t tried it again since I downloaded the updated map so I don’t know what the current condition would be.
I can’t fault Garmin too much for the location of my house though. None of the mapping services get anywhere near where I actually am.
I love my Garmin 350. But I hate the way they have their website structured for downloads. I’m running a map update for a 350 for a friend right now and its taking 4 hours. I did mine a month ago and it also took 4 hours. I suspect Garmin might be doing this on purpose to sell more CD versions. But whatver the reason, their web service truly sucks.
My dad recently got a Magellan GPS as a retirement gift. We really haven’t had the chance to test it out yet, but there will be an opportunity when we go to Atlantic City next week.
I would think that it would be prohibitively complex for the average person to have to record enough phonemes to load up a voice profile. However, there was a thread on that topic some time back and I think it is possible to load alternative files but I don’t think Garmin markets any.