Good for Highways, but lousy UI
Pros:
Highway lanes clearly marked, traffic updates
Cons:
Cumbersome user interface
The Bottom Line:
Cumbersome UI. Not worth it.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
My wife wanted a GPS unit for her car; I have a Subaru and my GPS was built in. I went to Radio Shack and looked at various units, but didn't try any of them. This one seemed to have lots of features for less than what other units at the same price point.
Setting it up was relatively easy: you have to attach the suction cup and power cord, and power the unit on. However, I found the user interface (UI) very cumbersome.
We were taking a family trip from southern Connecticut to New Hampshire. We decided to stop at the Rainforest Cafe in Burlington, MA on the way up. However, in order to enter this, you cannot simply enter in Rainforest Cafe. Instead, you have to type in the name of the town, and then the category, and then the restaurant, or the category, then the town, then the name of the restaurant... In contrast, on my Subaru, you just type in Rainforest and it gives you all the places that have Rainforest in the name. You hit Rainforest Cafe and it gives you a list of all of them, sorted by distance.
In New Hampshire, we went to an amusement park called Story Land. However, in order to put this into the GPS, I first had to pull out my PDA, surf to the website and look up the address so I could get the name of the town. Why can't this GPS unit just let you type the name of the place you want to go? Why does it make you surf through some hierarchical directory structure? All the data is in the machine. This seemed so damned inefficient.
We couldn't easily figure out how to get the unit into "night mode" on the drive home, which we did at night. There are a myriad of options, but we didn't see that one.
On the plus side, this unit does seem good for highway driving. It gives a reproduction of the green road signs above various lanes of traffic, with arrows pointing which lanes you want to be in. It has some sort of traffic update feature (at Radioshack, this was bundled into the cost of the unit). We drove during non peak hours, so this was never really an issue.
I took the unit back to Radioshack and will now try a garmin.
Compuplus.com
