For those of you considering a GPS, let me give you some free advice:
Avoid Magellan GPS systems like the plague.
The Magellan took me well over an hour out of my way on a 2 hour trip yesterday, and even when I corrected the route it kept trying to push me back to the wrong route.
I’ve been pretty happy with my TomTom, which connects to my Treo, but I recently decided to get a standalone unit to replace the Magellan GPS which I bought for my wife (only to find out she had no interest in it).
In the research I’ve done, it appears Garmin has the best systems for the USA. So I went over to their website and looked at their Automotive offerings:
- nüvi 300
- nüvi 350
- nüvi 310
- nüvi 360
- nüvi 370
- nüvi 660
- nüvi 670
- nüvi 680
- StreetPilot i2
- StreetPilot i3
- StreetPilot i5
- StreetPilot c310
- StreetPilot c320
- StreetPilot c330
- StreetPilot c340
- StreetPilot c510
- StreetPilot c530
- StreetPilot c550
- StreetPilot c580
- StreetPilot 2720
- StreetPilot 2820
- StreetPilot 7200
- StreetPilot 7500
- Quest
- Quest 2
- GVN 52
- VIB 10
27 different models! 8 called nüvi and 15 called StreetPilot. Do they really need that many? Looking at them I’d guess that several of them are marginal upgrades over the previous versions. Are they still selling them all? Why? Imagine if they took the top from each category (and I’m just guessing from the model names):
- nüvi 680
- StreetPilot i5
- StreetPilot c340
- StreetPilot c580
- StreetPilot 2820
- StreetPilot 7500
- Quest 2
- GVN 52
- VIB 10
A much more manageable list, although still too many. I left several different StreetPilots because I assume there is some fundamental design or feature difference between them. But how am I supposed to tell the difference between them?
Their comparison page will let you compare 10 out of 32…. Hrm…. 10… same number that I came up with if you trimmed the extra revisions.
Still… sometimes less is more.