04-11-2010, 03:10 AM
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.
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.