I’d never given much thought to owning a GPS until earlier this year when we visited a friend in Germany who had a Navigon GPS unit that was pretty nifty. He had moved to Düsseldorf in the past year and had never lived there before, so he got a GPS to help him find his way around a new city. Plus, his GPS unit was pretty cool in the way it not only provided directions and allowed him to look up destinations, but also because it would alert him to radar in use and also offer a virtual display of upcoming highway signs, which was useful for getting into the right lane. By the end of the weekend, I had decided I’d like to get a GPS when we got back, since I hadn’t had a car in Seattle previously and only vaguely knew my way around the city.
We had a fairly substantial Costco rebate to blow when we got to California, which basically offset the cost of a Garmin nüvi 260. Costco only had two other models (something by Magellan and a lower-end nüvi), and we opted for the 260 because it can speak street names and was also Mac compatible.
There are some fun features, like stats for a trip (sort of like the trip-meter built into many cars, but with more robust stats, such as average speed and fastest speed data). You can also customize the little car icon display (C found something that looked vaguely like our red Chevy, and we’ve had a reindeer with sleigh for the holidays, and now a Griswold-esque family station wagon hauling a much-too-large Christmas tree). These sorts of things are probably commonplace on modern GPS units, but having never had my run with another model, it’s all new to me.
Still, there are some aspects of the 260 that are a pain.
For one thing, it takes a long time to start up. As in, if I turn it on when I first get in the car, by the time it’s started up and reached the screen where I can search for an address, I’m already turning out of the driveway. Along these lines, it can be slow at times to find a name or address in its database.
Then there are weird quirks. For instance, when we took a day trip this weekend that basically involved getting on one state highway for 20 miles, then taking another state highway 70 miles, the 260 would alert us in advance every time the name of a particular stretch of highway was about to change, even though it required no turns or lane changes. And yet, yesterday when we exited the freeway to go to Ikea, it only said the destination was ahead on the left. So, I got in the left lane, which was a turn lane, only to realize too late that the 260 meant I should go straight because Ikea was a quarter-mile ahead on the left. So, we wound up driving around the block.
But probably the biggest problem I’ve found is that the 260 is slow to update. Like any decent GPS, it automatically recalcuates your route if you deviate from its directions. I do this quite often if I think an alternate route is faster or more convenient. Thus, I wanted to get to campus from the west side instead of entering from the east side, but once I passed the turnoff to go the east side (the way it initially tried to route me), it couldn’t figure out alternate instructions in time. Traveling at road speeds (30-40 mph, if that, with traffic), it kept trying to direct me down every street I passed, no matter how small, only it couldn’t calculate the alternate route quickly enough. So, it’d tell me to turn on 23rd as I was into the intersection (or beyond). Not very useful.
I was also a little disappointed that the 260 doesn’t display upcoming highway signs the way the Navigon did. The highways in any major city are often a confusing tangle of interchanges and offramps, and in Seattle especially you can’t necessarily count on ramps being in the far right lane. It’s a feature that would be quite nice, but is missing from the 260.
Still, it’s hard to be too critical of the 260 without having more basis for comparison. The major issues would be greatly resolved if the processor was simply faster. And it’s still a great thing to have, especially in a new city, but it’s nice being able to get directions on the go instead of having to plan everything out on paper before leaving home.
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