Garmin Quest Handheld GPS Receiver

Just bought this last month for a two week road & trail trip through Adirondack Park and New York. Let me caveat by saying this is my first GPS so I don't have anything to compare to. I purchased this unit because of favorable reviews and the desire for handheld use on trails as well as for the car. This necessitated me buying the Topo maps for eastern US in addition to the included city maps.

I found it easy setting up the trip in the computer and the transfer was painless. However, I am a pretty technically competent individual and quite computer literate. Over the course of two weeks of heavy use, I got very comfortable with the controls on the GPS and was easily able locate places and make changes on the fly.

For those new to GPS, I was not expecting the ability to find the nearest pharmacy, or car wash and found this a very pleasing feature. It was somewhat more difficult however, to find places that were further away from the current location. If a search to the map pointer yielded a result that you selected and then decided not to use it and try again you again had to find the map pointer location. This required a lot of zoom in and zoom out and was cumbersome.

The topo maps were a bit disappointing. Several trails were wrong on the topo but more importantly, the search indexing is poor. While I could visually locate and select a state campground on the map a name search usually provided no results. I would recommend using the computer to identify ALL your potential locations before your trip and download them. We were just winging the trip and often didn't know where we would be on a particular day. Finding campsites proved to be the most time consuming aspect of using the Quest. However, I was in every case able to find what I was looking for and the routing was flawless.

It took well more than a day with the unit on the entire time on battery only before I noticed any drain in the battery. Battery life seemed very good to me.

The memory size is a bit of a disappointment. My trip was from Virginia to Adirondack Park in upstate New York to Suffolk County Long Island New York and home. The topo maps for Adirondack Park alone were 77 meg. All the city maps for all sections I would be driving through were about 60 meg. This left me with a shortfall of about 20 meg. I ended up deleted city map files for my local area and the route up. This ultimately created a problem when I needed a detour in NJ. Although the highway map did a good job of detouring me around the turnpike, a construction detour forced me off of the selected route. The GPS at that point suggested turns when they didn't exist and other than its value as a Compass wasn't a great deal of use. If it hadn't been for the detour however, I would never have noticed a problem.

I did find the cradle that it sets in that affixes to the windshield to be a pain. Putting the Quest in the cradle was difficult and although I took the unit with me when I left the car, on a few occasions the cradle subsequently fell off the windshield after spending some hours in a heated car.

The speaker that plugs into the cigarette lighter does a fairly good job. I selected the option that provides a chime before an announcement was made. This allowed me to concentrate on listening. I should point out that I was driving a convertible with the top down and the stereo blasting. I also had my wife there to repeat the commands as needed. It would have been nice had the speaker also had its own mounting capability with a lengthy wire.

All in all I could not be more pleased with my purchase. The price is lower today than a month ago and then it was the best deal around. The Quest made this two week road trip a pleasure and one of the more satisfying purchases I have made for new technology.