The little GPS engine that could

Ok, so I got this one for Christmas from the in-laws. I usually research my little tinkertoys religiously, but while I had ogled GPS devices before, I had never looked into them seriously before because of cost.

So here are my thoughts. First off, it uses AA batteries, but
they are not included. It being Christmas, all the stores were closed so it was a little hard to turn on. Luckily it also comes with a USB cable and a car power cable so I wasn't completely out of power options.

It works with USB power, so I used that. I installed the software 'MapSource' from the DVD. This includes a full USA roadmap down to the neighborhood street level, which is pretty good. Unfortunately it needs to be 'unlocked'. The unlock code is on a tiny piece of yellow paper (4x6 inches) which had already made it into the trash can. Ok, so I dug it up, phew. In eleven different languages it states in a 6 point font how important this yellow piece of paper is. It included the unit's serial number, the registration code and the MapSource software unlock code.

After the successful unlock, I was able to check out MapSource. It's not as slick as Google maps, but it will do.
In particular it doesn't allow you to drag the map and zoom in (left click) and zoom out (right click) like it should. Instead you constantly have to select from a toolbar to either drag or zoom in/out. In other words, the MapSource interface can be improved a bit, user interface-wise.

You can select a number of maps and then upload them to your
Garmin device. My device came with 64Mb, which translates into about three maps (for example Northern Florida, Georgia and Tennessee). It turned out we made a day trip into the area described by the Southern Florida map, so we ended up 'off road' and the trip calculation (which started and ended in known territory) seemed to hang.

I would say 64Mb is not enough for most people, since you typically want the map for the state you live in, plus your surrounding states. This typically equates to 100-200Mb. I've already bought a new 1Gb memory card for $70 at Radio Shack. It's in the MicroSD format I believe and it switches out with the 64Mb card located in the battery compartment. I now have about 10 states which is about 350Mb.

When you turn it on (bottom right button) it first starts to look for satellites. It comes with a backlight, but it always resets to the zero level and doesn't remember the setting when you turn it off. So basically you have to press the power button four times to get it back to the maximum level.

The top right button cycles through all the basic 'views' that are defined. You can customize this which is pretty cool. It also doubles as the 'escape' button for when you are in a given menu view. The bottom left button is the 'menu' button. Press it once for a 'view' context sensitive menu and again for the main menu. I think this is all very well thought out. The mental navigation picture is one main cycle with every node having a drill down possibility.

For map views there are zoom in/out buttons on the left, which work ok, although it takes many steps to go from the nationwide level to the street level, and this is not customizable as far as I can tell.

There is a little joystick thingie on the front, right above the screen. It goes up, down, left and right and you can press it to click 'ok'. It works fine although sometimes you end up doing a direction when you try to center click on it. Also when you hang it around your neck while walking the little joystick may accidentally center click.

Many views can be customized in many many ways. There is an eight field 'Trip Computer' view, where every field can take any from 34 values like Speed, ETA, Heading, etc. The main map view can also add two or four data field, but the map become very small after that.

The Find feature also works quite nicely and allow you to find addresses, cities and other preprogrammed points of interest. I'm still trying to find the best settings for programming routes (quickest, quick, better, best). The best setting is really slow to recalculate and the quickest setting can sometimes come up with some rather 'creative' routes.