time to buy a gps, which one?

[Winston]

lazydays wrote:
I'd like to buy a gps but I know there are issues regarding which ones a mac can talk to so I'm here for advice. I want a nice large easy to read screen, voice instructions, and a good way to mount it in the car. I'd also like to switch it between my two cars so being able to get an additional mount would be handy. Thanks for the advice!

1. You should not leave the GPS unit or the mount in the car, and if you use a mount on the windshield you should wipe off the mark it leaves. They are break-in magnets. The suction cup mounts that most GPS units come with are easy to remove and reinstall. I'd just keep the unit and mount together.

2. There used to be a big difference in the maps used. Garmin uses Navteq maps (now owned by Nokia) and TomTom uses TeleAtlas (now owned by TomTom). My sense is that the difference between the two has narrowed a lot. Google recently signed an agreement to use TeleAtlas for Google Maps, and I don't think they'd have done that without fair confidence in the maps.

3. The two main features to look for beyond maps and directions are:
- turn by turn voice directions with streets. I mean the kind that says "turn left on Main Street", not just "turn left"
- traffic info

4. A GPS does not need to talk to your Mac unless you are updating maps. While maps do change, the vast majority of roads change very slowly. With our Garmin I think there is also an option to load maps from an SD card.

Voice directions with street naming are valuable as a safety measure. I would not get a GPS which does not have this. We do not have traffic info on our Garmin unit. I think if I were buying one today I'd include that. Having seen it on Google Maps on an iPhone, it can be really helpful to see how the traffic is going. The GPS units with traffic are supposed to be able to route you around slower spots to give you the shortest travel time. I have not seen comparisons of how this feature works, but it could be a big help depending on where you drive.

We don't use the points-of-interest features much, so I can't comment about finding restaurants, etc. An iPhone would be a lot more useful for this as you have access to ratings from places like Yelp and Urban Spoon. But a good POI database in the GPS can be useful.

Article Accelerator said that iPhones use "A-GPS" which allows for faster initialization. This is true and not true. As a standalone GPS and iPhone uses a slow GPS chip which does not work very well at all. What iPhones can do is use the cellular network and a WiFi locations database to get fixes faster. In our experience with an iPhone vs. the Garmin, the Garmin is a much better GPS unit overall, because it has the latest SiRFStar GPS chip (this is the "gold standard" in GPS chips). An iPhone will probably work as well as a standalone GPS in urban areas, but it does poorly where it depends more on its GPS chip. The mounting kits AA mentions include better GPS chips not just for the iPad Touch, but because the iPhone itself has a lousy GPS chip.


Good luck.

- Winston

[testcase]

TomToms play nice with Mac OS. My original TomTom 910 had a 20GB hard drive and a battery that lasted a minimum of six hours. I traded up to a TomTom920. The 920 is based on a SD card. Without the HD, TomTom was able to use a much smaller case. Unfortunately, the battery in the 920 barely makes 1.5 hours. I also keep getting offers for map upgrades at $39.99 but, when I follow the link, that special price is not available.

[lazydays]

I think I've settled on the Garmin 765. Now I am curious about mounts. It appears I can get either the suction cup style or the bean bag on the dash style. The suction cup style looks more stable but I'm wondering how easy it is to remove. I drive a convertible so I can never leave it attached while the car is parked.

[M>B>]

California limits windshield mounting location...

1) Within a "seven-inch square in the lower corner of the windshield" on the passenger side, says the law.

2) Within a "five-inch square in the lower corner" on the driver's side.

Which in my instance with a steeply sloped windshield that location puts it to far away for reading and out of reach for the touch screen!

Many other states have restrictions too.

[CJsNvrUrly]

lazydays wrote:
I think I've settled on the Garmin 765. Now I am curious about mounts. It appears I can get either the suction cup style or the bean bag on the dash style. The suction cup style looks more stable but I'm wondering how easy it is to remove. I drive a convertible so I can never leave it attached while the car is parked.

That's the one I bought one year ago. I'm very happy with it. I bought the bean bag mount and just carry it into the house altogether or stash it on the floor or someplace in the car when I'm out and about. The windshield mount works fine, too, though. It's very easy to attach or remove.

Edit: Correction...Mine is a 760, not 765.

[Grateful11]

Garmin 255W, it's great!

[tenders]

Winston's advice as usual is spot-on.

I've been using GPS since 1991 and have owned Garmin units since 1995. These days I have a Garmin 765T (T for lifetime traffic) with a beanbag and it's quite good. I bought it as a refurb from newegg.com for under $200, which may be all you want to spend on a GPS; my last one, a lesser model, got stolen out of my car in my own driveway.

Its one weakness is that its FM transmitter, which can send the audio to an FM radio station if you don't want it to play through the GPS unit speaker, is quite weak. But this is a stupid feature, I wouldn't use it anyway.

The feature I am coming to like the most is the Bluetooth integration. None of my cars have this installed and it's quite useful to answer the GPS rather than fish through my pockets for the phone if it rings while I'm driving. Voice quality is much higher than I expected.

Garmin is now very, but not fully, Mac compatible. Maps easily update through the Mac, waypoints back up through the Mac, etc. Their Windows support offers a bell (or is it a whistle? one of the two) that lets you record your own voice for some of the GPS commands, but this is another silly feature.

[Ken Sp.]

FYI-for those mentioning iPhone apps-Mapquest 4 mobile offers voice turn by turn for FREE.
The interface is just OK-but it performs nicely if listening to iTunes. It turns down the iTunes audio softly and it is back on quickly.

[JEBB]

I bought a TomTom 130 refurb. Overall it has not been a good experience. The map on a refurb at time of manufacture is the map you get, which could be quite old; it costs about the same as the device for a new map. I'm on my third one; the other two died within a month but were replaced on warranty.