Lots of features for the price compared to their more costly 2600 series.
Pros:
Comes with everything: charger, mount, City Select CD, cigarette cord with speaker attached.
Cons:
Small memory at 115 megs for California maps. Built-in battery may be costly to replace.
The Bottom Line:
Aside from the small memory (for me in a large state) and internal battery, this is a very nice unit that works well.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
For something that can fit in your pocket, this little thing does a lot. Nice that you can take it off the mount and use it for navigating out of the car while running on is internal battery. The display is very bright when the backlight is on (when the cig's power cord is plugged in) and even on the dash it is easily visible in bright daylight. When the backlight is off, it is faint and can be hard to see.
The suction cup holds tight to the windshield. They are coming out with another mount for motorcyclists in February that is supposed to have a jack so motorcyclists can plug their helmet speakers into it. It's waterproof too - or at least water resistant.
The memory could be bigger since memory costs next to nothing these days. The 115 meg internal will not hold all of the City Select maps for California, holding maybe 75%-85%. Nicer would have been at least 256 megs so a little bit of out-of-state maps could be added.
The voice portion works well and warns you about 3 times of an approaching turn. Even knows which way the on ramp will come. You can set a route up without the software on your computer by positioning the pointer over your destination and letting it calculate a turn-by-turn route. Miss a turn? It recalculates and you can set it to avoid dense highways if you like. The female voice never says the street by name, it says "Turn right 500 feet next intersection".."ramp"..."etc."
I am not fond of devices with built-in non-user serviceable batteries. Seems all our family battery powered devices fail in around a year; tootbrushes, shavers, laptop batteries, iPods. This may be a costly yearly maintenance issue but it is too new to learn anything here.
It packs enough info that you can find nearest gas, food, lodging as well as others. Even has phone numbers of the selections! Software is by NavTeq, same as some of the online mappers.
I did find it is not as sensitive as my other hiking GPS and can lose satellite reception if you don't have it near your windshield. Still, if you got good signal, it does a remarkable job tracking.
Still, I highly recommend this little unit. Nice job Garmin.
