New Car -- Nav system or not?

BCEagle91
Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:49:12 +0000

I bought a Garmin Nuvi 2595 two weeks ago and took it on a 2,000+ mile trip. My previous Garmin was an iQue 3600 (combination PDA/GPS) which I bought in 2003 and has served me well. I wanted a new solution as my old GPS was underpowered and it would have taken five to ten hours to update the maps and download them to the device. Back then, storage devices were much smaller so you couldn’t store all of North America on the device. You had to pick the states that you wanted to bring with you.

So I bought the device and had no problems using it. Garmin removed a lot of the features from the model that I had but greatly improved the interface. The trip was much easier with the Garmin. We had a 3G iPad 2 with us as well so we could zoom out and plan outside of the GPS.

Benefits of a Garmin vs in-car system:


Our Nuvi 2595 was $250 and I bought a beanbag mount for $50. I much prefer the beanbag mount to the suction cup mount. The $250 price includes lifetime free map updates. Map updates for my old Garmin are about $75/year. So no paying for map updates.
Voice recognition - this was great for finding services along the way.
We rented a car for the trip so we could just move the Nuvi from my car to the rental car.
Ability to use it as a pedestrian. We were with a group of people looking for a restaurant that could accommodate us. We didn’t have a 3G signal so we couldn’t use the iPad. I took out the Garmin and was able to find restaurants that we could phone for availability. That would be hard to do with an in-car system with a large group of people.
I wonder if I can use it for my runs, similar to the watch-based systems with running track software.
To update the maps or the software, you just plug it into your computer and go to a web page where it will check for updates for your device and install them if you wish.
It has bluetooth so that it can import your address book from your phone, receive and place calls, etc.
Technology improves at a pretty fast clip. Buying a cheap system means that you can upgrade five years from now when there’s are compelling technological reasons for doing so. One of these days I expect GPS systems will provide weather information on demand.
The Nuvi we bought reports traffic conditions.
I like the GPS to be up on the dashboard as opposed to the console (it’s in the console on many cars) so that I can take a quick glance without the road leaving my vision range.
Satellite acquisition on the new Garmin is so much faster than on the old one. The old one would normally take at least a minute to lock the position and could take up to three minutes. The new one locks in a few to several seconds. I expect that this technology will continue to improve with time.