3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Excellent Choice for a GPS Unit
Date of Review: Aug 25, 2006
The Bottom Line: This unit is an excellent choice in handheld GPS's.
This is my second Garmin unit. My first died after about 5 years of heavy use.
I researched quite heavily, looked at different manufacturers but kept coming back to Garmin. Looked at a couple different Garmins and settled on this one. No regrets in doing so.
I have had it now for about 2 months and think it is great.
The unit has great signal acquisition and holding. Once I received a fix, it is very tough to drop it. I have even taken it into my office once I have had a signal and it holds it (Great for when I need to navigate around the piles of paperwork).
Like another reviewer wrote, the base map is very limited. I have the City Navigator maps and find them very accurate. Plan on spending about $110 on the map software.
Menus are quite extensive. Only real complaint I have on them is that the search menus can be inconsistent. On the search menus, you start entering letters that are in whatever you are searching for. As you enter letters, the screen will narrow down your search. Once you see your choice on the screen, this is where it gets confusing. On some of the search screens, you can hit the "Quit" key and it will show the list so you can pick your choice. On other search screens, hitting "Quit" will remove all of your entered letters and take you back to the default search. On these screens, you have to move the cursor to "OK" to be able to pick from the list.
Routing is awesome. Enter an address and it takes you there. If you turn off of the suggested route, it will automatically recalculate. Only issue I have is that it really really likes limited access highways. One route preferred a highway over secondary highways. The highway showed 26 miles while secondary roads were 18 miles. I drove the secondary route and the unit kept beeping as it would recalculate the route. At one point, the unit wanted me to turn around and go back 2 miles to get on a toll road.
Over all, I give this unit 4.5 out of 5 stars. Excellent unit, cost not really that bad compared to other units out there.
Nu-Image Corporation
