Overall I love this unit. I recommend it to friends and demo it in their cars when we travel. The other reviews cover a lot of the features and I agree with most of what has been said about this unit. I've extensively used two other nav systems, Hertz's and the built in one on my previous car, a Nissan 2005 Quest. I like this a lot more then either one. I have had this for 10 months now and use it almost daily. I found early on some issues and had to struggle to not complain as I learned its many amazing features. Mnay early issues were resolved by sitting with it and drilling down into new screens and features. The review below is based on many thousands of miles driven trying to either challenge it or fine tune my understanding of it. I've driven in new areas, well known areas, learned new routes, been through challenging city environments and almost featureless landscapes. If I didn't like it so much I would not have taken the time to review it at this depth. I hope it is useful. I rarely travel without it. Size and form: Fits in my Honda Accord glove box fine. The remote is great and key to a good nav experience for me. Screen has good room for interesting info. Found out like many cars my speedometer over estimates my speed by 3 to 4 mph at any speed over 10 mph. For the size I would have liked a speaker built in, as others have noted. Missing feature/place for improvement #1: The buttons on the unit are okay but why not a mute button? Garmin knows there will be sound coming out of it, the AUX to car stereo or the one on the power cord, plenty of room for one. No external mute anywhere either on the unit of the remote is a serious oversight. XM and traffic: Far out! Who knew what was out there on XM! I love it! The choices are wonderful. And the traffic avoidance! WOW! On trips XM is a fabulous choice when the local radio isn't playing anything interesting. One thing I didn't know what Hawaii is not covered by XM. I drove around Maui for 10 days missing my XM radio. Signal strength varies as you reach the Pacific Coast and are in mountains like in Colorado. The XM traffic is AMAZING. Incidents pop up on the map, the voice will say "activating better route" and the recalculate function routes you around accidents, construction, etc. I've learned several new routes due to this feature and saved amazing amounts of time commuting in LA County and traveling on the weekends to nearby counties for fun. I don't feel right driving anymore with out this aid, very worthwhile, pays for itself right away in hours saved. There are two issues I have with the traffic calculations. One is the info is delayed a bit, I've encountered incidents I heard on AM radio reports that XM didn't know yet. And cleared incidents have a lag also. Missing feature/place for improvement #2: I wish there was a recalculate feature that started from the top and regathered the traffic info, or even bypassed it. Sometimes the unit is so set on a route I have to power it off, power it back on without the XM antenna, set the destination, reattach the antenna to get it to generate a useful route that doesn't insist on a huge detour. Maps, routing and zoom: Love the maps, rarely confused when looking at them or listening to the descriptions of where to go. Complex keep left/then immediately exit right when not listening to the audio could be better. Missing feature/place for improvement #3: Use of telling the driver the recommended lanes to be in would be a HUGE help. I love the auto-zoom in as I approach the turn, very well done. I wish I could set the auto-zoom out to a more focused view. A 10 to 50 mile view when on long freeways is pretty much uninteresting, I want to see the local stuff as I drive through an area. I manually hit the IN button on the remote 5 to 6 times to see a view pretty much what the freeway signs are confirming to me. More on routing and voice announcements: It is annoying to hear every freeway interchange as I drive interrupt the XM music. After a few days I discovered a mode that just does a tone when it wants to tell me something, a huge relief. I almost sent it back based on the annoyance of the routing. If I am on a freeway and not leaving it shut up already! So, I killed the voice and can hit the SPEAK button when needed. Route choices: Why can't this amazing machine learn my preferences and given that I ignored its directions a dozen times and always take a particular route incorporate what I do in its routing? It is tracking where I go, I see the dots of past travel. I have to put a hard avoid road or two in to get it to go the way I want it to. Missing feature/place for improvement #4: A preference to "follow breadcrumbs" would be good, don't you think? Avoidance ratings: Three levels of avoidance, prefer, don't avoid, avoid. What's up with that? Use a road? Yes, maybe or no. I get exasperated with it wanting me to get on every freeway anywhere near my start or end of route. It has me go on three sides of a square 5 miles each leg rather than go 5 miles on surface streets in the mode of "don't avoid" medium roads. Most of the thoroughfares in LA County it counts as medium. Say what? Missing feature/place for improvement #5: Give me more levels of road classifications (Interstates, US routes, state routes, county routes, main streets, medium streets local streets, dirt roads, based on civil engineer classifications maybe), give me as many levels of choice (with the above, say 8). Have a default of if the travel is less than X number of miles auto-avoid any freeways, or auto-prefer other roads. Even destinations less than 2 miles away on surface streets it urges me to get on freeways. Setting destinations: Works well for addresses. Setting an address number and street and letting it pop up with the list of cities to choose from is amazing. 50% of the time the address turns out to be unique and only one California destination fits. Works sometimes well and not others for points of interest. The classification systems for restaurants is challenged and not all that useful. I enter the city as a destination, enter the name search and click "find near destination." Clunky but it works. PC interface: I use a lot of computers and am confident that I understand ergonomics pretty well. I have to say I am not attracted to using this as it is so, well, bad. What I have poked around in I don't see a lot of automation, it seems mostly attuned to data entry. Missing feature/place for improvement #5: What I would love to see is a Google Maps interface that works like say you search for "Whole Foods Markets near here" and it gives you an option to populate the Garmin address book. And you could hook up the Garmin and it auto populates the Favorites. Sigh, I wish this were the case. Signal strength: Cities sometimes confuse it as most nav systems are confused. Review your route ahead of times when you are going into high rise areas. LA is fine, few high rises. SF was laughable at times, Seattle too, with all the bounces. Sitting still it would say we were driving at different speeds as satellite signals bounced in around the buildings. Bluetooth: Until I got my Jawbone headset I used this all the time. Now only when the `bone is out of juice do I use it. So, I love it, overall. I am annoyed with it in places and can see where minor programming and interface or hardware changes could make this even better than the outstanding unit it is. It is SOOOO close to what I have always expected from nav systems when they were first described to me. Good job Garmin, an "A" rating, close to "A+"!
| Satisfaction | Score |
|---|
| Overall satisfaction | 10 |
|
| 