Garmin StreetPilot c550 Car GPS Receiver

My fiance suffers the ill fate of having a birthday less than a month from Christmas. I always promised myself I'd never do the "birthday/Christmas" combined-gift thing for her, but then last year she asked for a GPS receiver. She said that since she wanted a big-ticket item I could make it a combined gift, so I relented. Let the electronics shopping begin!


Choosing the Garmin brand

GPS receivers have become a pretty hot ticket lately, so of course there are a plethora of manufacturers vying for your attention. The "big three" seem to be Garmin, Tom Tom and Magellan. We did some online comparisons first, and the price/features ratio seemed to favor Garmin pretty well, as did reviews we read on several retailers' websites. We went into Best Buy and got a surprisingly helpful associate, who verified our belief (without prompting) by telling us that Garmin's units were a better value, the most user-friendly and had an equal or lower amount of breakage compared to any other manufacturer. Given all of this, we narrowed our choice to Garmin pretty quickly as the manufacturer.


Choosing the c550

We were trying to understand what differentiates the various price levels of GPS receivers. They all give you directions in your car, right? Well, it turns out there are plenty of differences. The basic models give you directions, and that's about it. But you can add on all sorts of features, like a good battery to make the unit more portable outside of your car; live traffic updates; text-to-speech so that the unit says street names instead of "turn right now"; and Bluetooth enablement so you can sync your unit with your phone. The Garmin c550 offered all of the above except for a great battery; the live traffic was a huge plus for us, even if it is a $5/month service, as we live in the congested suburbs of Washington DC.


Setting up the c550

Setup could not have been more of a breeze with this unit. Mount it on your windshield (or dashboard -- your choice), walk through some quick setup and you're ready to roll. Of course, there's a manual in the box, but the unit is very, very intuitive, which makes it great for the uninitiated. You can plug in destinations by address or search for them by name, set your home address, save other favorites -- pretty much, the Garmin does the hard work for you. You can also set navigation preferences such as avoiding toll roads (a big help for quick errands in our area, where a pricey toll road is the main highway).


The positives -- using the c550 day-to-day

If I was shopping for a new GPS unit, knowing everything I know today, this is still the one I would pick. My fiance loves it, never worries about getting lost anymore and has no troubles using it. Anytime we're going somewhere we've never been, whether it's getting furniture off Craigslist, trying a new restaurant or heading into DC for a night on the town, the Garmin gets us where we're going without any trouble at all. If we miss a turn, it recalculates and gets us right back on course. It's easy to move from my fiance's car to mine, and back again before she catches me, with the suction-cup mount. It's nice that the unit reads off street names out loud, instead of providing generic turning instructions, especially since so many streets are so close together where we live. And the live traffic updates and "detour" capability have helped us avoid a few major headaches and even taught us a few new back-routes to avoid them in the future. The screen is also good at shining brightly during the daytime and dimming itself enough to avoid distraction at night, which is a big plus in the safety department. All in all, we love our c550!


The negatives -- what's not to love?

Let me qualify all of the below by saying that they're minor detractions from a product that we're very happy with. However, nothing is perfect, and there are some improvements that we'd love to see in our next GPS purchase from Garmin. Our biggest beef is that the maps and listings were about six months out of date when we bought the unit. The unit should really have come with one free update, as updated maps from Garmin cost over $100. It's just frustrating that the new interchange near our house is still treated like a traffic light, and the unit "recalculates" every time we drive through it, plus several local stores are not in the lookups if they were built recently, even though they're older than the unit itself. We also find that the Garmin doesn't always pick the quickest route for short local trips that we're familiar with -- we'll take our own route and beat the GPS's "estimated arrival time" by a few minutes. The battery life, as mentioned above, is not great (buy a Nüvi if this is an important feature to you) -- we took the c550 in a friend's car once, and forgot the charger, and only got about thirty minutes out of it. Lastly, this unit can really cast a glare on the windshield, especially at night -- a small half-inch "hood" over the screen would improve driver visibility and not block the screen at all. Finally, this feature was not critical to us, but the Bluetooth capability was not compatible with my fiance's phone (a popular Samsung model). We felt that it should have been, or that it should have at least included a list -- we had to dig through several layers of Garmin's website just to find out that they were never designed to work together.


In Conclusion

We really love the Garmin c550 StreetPilot. Even with slightly outdated maps and a couple of quirks, the unit has been reliable, easy-to-use and problem-free for its first six months. It gets us all around the area quickly and easily, and even helps us keep out of traffic jams with new back routes. My fiance is much more comfortable finding her way around with the Garmin c550 than she was with printed directions, and we both are able to do more spur-of-the-moment combined errands, even in areas that we're not familiar with. When we bought this unit we paid about $700, on sale and with a 10% off coupon -- today they're going for more like $500, which is just the way of technology, and it makes this unit an even better value for any GPS shopper on the market.