Recommend a good GPS device

In My Humble Opinion
1

While I am pretty good at finding my way around and I can read maps, I thought it might be nice to get a GPS device. Does anyone have any good recommendations? I went to Best Buy to see what they have and the descriptions weren’t very helpful; and while you could see the devices, it’s hard to know how well it will work when you’re just standing there as opposed to driving around.

Does anyone have a GPS device that they really like? Are there certain features I should look for? Or certain features I should look out for? I’m not looking for something with all the bells and whistles but it doesn’t have to be the cheapest either.

Thanks in advance for any advice. I’m sure this topic has come up before but I couldn’t find any past threads on it.

2

I’ve been looking at the Garmin nüvi 660. It has mostly good reviews. I was also looking at Magellan, but I was put off by the bad reviews that mentioned very poor customer service. Garmin makes ‘glass panels’ for aircraft, so I’m a little biased.

But full disclosure: The only GPS I’ve used is a non-mapping Magellan. I didn’t find it very useful, as the batteries ran out before I was done fishing. I’ve not used one like the nüvi, but a friend has a GPS in his Prius and I like the concept.

3

It depends a great deal on what you want to do with it. Do you want to use it while driving, or while hiking, or while boating, or some combination? Do you want to be able to load maps onto it, and even look up the closest pizza restaurant? Do you want to be able to record what it measures?

I use Garmin GPS 60 handhelds to average waypoints in amateur surveying. By leaving them for days, I have gotten repeatabilities as good as about an inch! They cost in the mid 100’s, and accept external antennas and data cables to talk to PCs. But they have a tiny display and don’t accept maps, so they’d be pretty frustrating for navigating a car.

4

I’d want to use it while driving, so I could know how to get to whatever certain address. I don’t hike or boat or other stuff like that so I wouldn’t need it for outdoorsy stuff.

I don’t think I would need to load maps onto it, but I would like it to have the capability of looking up the closest pizza restaurant or book store or whatever. I don’t think I would need it to record anything.

I think I would be happy with a pretty basic model, but I want it to work well and give clear directions and have a decent user interface.

5

I bought my wife a Magellan 360 last Christmas as an inexpensive model which could still get her home in one piece. We’re pretty happy with basic features of it and its performance (although sometimes it lags on following the car) but Magellan pretty much abandoned it out of the gate as far as updates and maps go. Although it has points of interest and restaurants/hotels pre-loaded, they are now several years out of date. so are the maps themselves although that hasn’t been a big problem for her.

All in all, decent starter model and works okay but the total lack of support makes me unwilling to recommend a Magellan.

6

Just a very limited experience here. I bought a Zire 72 with a tomtom gps package a few years back. It’s OK, but for some reason the car charger didn’t work. And I didn’t realize it until I was on a 4 hour trip with a 2 hour battery life. I had to stop at a restaurant to recharge the battery to get the rest of the way on my trip.

So I’d advise on looking for battery life. There are now models with up to 8 hours battery life with many in the 4-6 range. It’s doubtful that your car charger won’t work like mine, but I’d still rather be able to do without it.

And I wouldn’t recommend the tomtom. It’s OK, but the interface isn’t the best.

7

I’m a big fan of the Garmin units, there are cheaper ones but I don’t think any of them are as rugged and reliable as Garmin. How much do you want to spend? Here’s a list of units from NewEgg. (Garmin units at the Egg) I recommend getting the largest display you can afford, you don’t want to have an accident because you were squinting at a tiny GPS screen instead of watching the road. I like the nüvi 250W and if I had the money I have one already, but I have to wait till I get my tax refund in March. The up side is that it’ll be cheaper and maybe I can get some more home brew equipment.

8

I recently bought a GPS nav system for the car. I drive a lot for my job and it’s already helped a number of times. My days of getting lost are over.

After significant research, I went with the Garmin nuvi 200W. This is the barebones widescreen version. I can heartily recommend it! Very intuitive and the unit looks great. The only feature I wish it had was the text-to-speech to read the street names so that instead of saying “Turn left in point two miles” it might say “Turn left ahead at Poplar Street”.

Amazon sale price:$250

I bought my dad one for his birthday a couple weeks ago. I got him the Garmin Steetpilot c340. He really enjoys it.

9

We recently bought a GPS unit. We had considered it on and off for a while, then my SIL moved house to a far distant suburb (an hour and a half from our place) with which we were unfamiliar. It is in a semi-rural area with poor street lighting and poorer signposting.

SIL helpfully provided directions for how to get from her old place to the new one. Unfortunately she provided a different set to my MIL and to me. Both sets worked, but were significantly different. My husband was driving, I was in the front seat giving the directions. My MIL was in the back seat, also giving directions. Did I mention that they were different? My husband is a dear, good man, with absolutely no patience whatsoever.

We bought a GPS unit the next day.

We got the Garmin 610 nuvi, for several reasons:

It has a large, clear screen.

It will speak the name of the street (eg not just “Turn left” , but "Turn Left in 450m at Great Northern Road), giving you 2 chances to pick the correct street in a crowded intersection.

You can sync your bluetooth phone to it, so can really do handsfree.

You can load MP3/audiobooks into it. On long trips we listen to all 36 CDs of Ruby!.

It recalculates quickly if you do not take its recommended route, so you are not likely to miss the next turn. Very useful in a city with a lot of construction going on, where streets may be unexpectledly blocked.

It does have 2 drawbacks:

Its Australian accent isn’t accurate, so it is a bit jarring on common street names. The US accent may be more accurate.

It doesn’t always calculate the shortest route. But that may be addressed in the update which is due soon.

It is, in short, one of the purchases which we are most satisfied with.

10

Another Nuvi (680) checking in. Definitely a good investment, even if I don’t use all the bells and whistles. If you do decide to buy from BB, they will install it for you for a fee of $30-$40, with the power coming directly off the battery, so you’ll have fewer wires dangling across the car.

11

Have you ever seen the episode of The Office where Steve Carell follows his GPS into a lake? Sometimes the maps don’t bear a 100% relationship to the real world. Many a time have I driven onto a tiny road out in the sticks only for it to terminate in a field. Sometimes the auto-route function tells me to turn left onto the Freeway, which can be, shall we say, challenging.

12

Thanks for all the advice so far. I’d like to spend less than $400, but I’d be willing to go over that amount some if there was something really great.

I hadn’t even thought about the installation. How hard are they to install? If they are somewhat difficult to install or if it would be hard to find someone to install a GPS device, then that would lean me towards getting it from Best Buy.

13

Basic installation is

a) stick windshield mount onto windshield

b) Stick power cable into cigarette lighter

The fancy stuff that involves lifting the hood is purely for cosmetic purposes.

14

Heh, ok. I wouldn’t mind having a few wires sticking out, as long as they’re not in the way of anything.

This made me think of another question - do most devices let you easily look up what directions it will tell you to take? For example, I’m in my car about to drive from my apartment to a restaurant, and I want to look at the directions and see if the directions tell me to take Oak St, because I know that Oak St has construction and I want to avoid it. Would I be able to look through all the directions at the beginning of the trip, or would I have to wait until I was at Oak St (or at the side of a lake like in The Office) and then I would have to get the device to calculate a new route then?

15

Mine lets you flip between the map and a set of step-by-step written instructions. In fact, if it ever loses the satellite due to bad weather or other obstructions it will revert to the step-by-step directions so you can at least have a fighting chance. I imagine that this is standard for most systems. Mine doesn’t let you exclude streets before the trip but, if I know that Oak St is under construction, I can just drive down to the next exit, skipping that part of town entirely and let it recalculate. Keep in mine that my model is an older low-end one so others might give you more flexibility.

The only time I’ve ever really lost the signal though was when going through long mountain tunnels and there wasn’t much risk of getting lost there.

16

My Garmin Nuvi 200W does pretty much the same as Jophiel describes. You can look at the directions it plans to give you before you even set off so you can, say, read them to another party. You can also view the map overhead and zoom in and out to make sense of it all while seeing the big, overall picture with your route plotted in am easy to see pink.

One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes, the only difference between two similar models is map coverage. The Nuvi 200W and 250W are identical except the 250W has Canada, Alaska and Hawaii coverage. Right now, there’s a whopping $290 difference in price at Amazon between the two:
250W @$589 (ripoff, IMO) vs 200W @$279.
If you can live without the streets read to you and your GPS nav playing MP3s, the Garmin Nuvi 200W’s are really worth consideration.

17

I clicked your link and the 250W is $310.

18

Yep, my mistake. That was the shopping cart total, the sum of both prices.

19

I’m going to go against the flow and put a nod in for my Magellan Maestro 3140. I lurvs it.

It has two things I wanted: Syncs with my cell via bluetooth, and text-to-speech, so that it says street names, instead of just telling you to turn right in x metres. If you’re in the States, it also has a AAA tourbook and member roadside assistance.

With 4,000,000 Points of Interest pre-loaded, you can definitely find the closest pizza place, and it comes with a USB cable and software so that you can load custom POI’s (I loaded all the Tim Hortons in Canada).

I’ve never had to use their customer support, so I have no comments there. MSRP is $399, but you can find better. I got mine for $299 CAD.

Also, check out http://www.gpsreview.net.

20

Do note that this may be illegal - it is in the UK if it obstructs the driver’s view. Most police don’t bother, but if they’re looking for an excuse…

Besides that, the mark on the windshield is a dead giveaway to thieves that there’s something valuable in the car.

You might also consider that some mobile phones have GPS / Satnav capabilities. E.g. Nokia N95.