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Originally Posted by MrT-Man
I'm contemplating the Nuvi -- what's your experience been with it so far? I trust Garmin maps more than the TomTom's, & like the fact that the Nuvi seems small & thin & light.
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i like it quite a lot.
the maps seem fairly good, but there are quite a few complaints that city
navigator 7's POI database isn't as good as the older v 6 database.
(from personal experience, in the inland empire area of the pacific northwest,
quite a few POI's are either really old or in the wrong place).
for pure address to address navigation, it's fantastic. time to lockon
is quite fast even in less than ideal conditions (like inside my garage
w/ the door down). the text to speech (TTS) makes for easier to
understand directions. it actually speaks the exit name and number
instead of 'exit left'...
unlike the current tomtom's, it knows which side of the street an address is on.
i really like that fact that it's very portable and easy to remove when i leave
the vehicle (especially when i'm street parking). and since the suction
mount can stick to the speedo face, it's makes my vehicle less tempting.
it was invaluable when i was in honolulu, where several times, i came
to streets where the lane configuration had been changed for rush hour.
i would have never found my way back to the hotel from the worksite without it.
i'm also thrilled that it works very well w/ my mac.
(garmin has been extremely mac-unfriendly in the past, and probably still is).
the nuvi mounts up as USB mass storage device and firmware updates
can be done by unzipping the exe file and copying them into the
garmin folder on the nuvi. (this is exactly what the pc installer does!!).
[i did hestitate on the purchase since i don't have ready access to a non-locked down
pc from which to do firmware updates, but, as above, it's not a problem]
and VPC 7.0.2 detects it as a USB device, so even the POI loader works great.
(garmin uses a proprietory USB process to talk to thier other
gps devices which is incompatible w/ VPC 7.0)
one thing that's kinda cool, is that the nuvi will voice navigate, play
mp3's or audio books, display a jpeg slideshow all at the SAME time.
it will automatically pause the mp3 and give the voice direction.
(i looked at the magellan RM800, and it can only ONE thing at a time)
the bad:
1) requires a ground loop isolator when used w/ the mini aux adapter
(the stock non-HK radio keeps loosing the aux input when the nuvi
is powered from the cigarette lighter. it's okay when the nuvi runs off
its internal battery)
2) only included a USB 1.1 interface, so uploading mp3's and jpegs is
slow to the flash memory. i'm experimenting w/ using a 512 MB SD
card in the add on slot. this appears to be 10x faster since i've got a
USB 2.0 card writer.
