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14 Nov 2008 02:24 pm
My current GPS is still in perfect condition. I say this to preface how difficult it is for me to make a decision about upgrading, even though the desire to upgrade is most decidedly there.
I currently own a Garmin Nuvi 360. It’s been my companion on many a trip, locally and internationally, for a couple of years now. I have numerous personal items stored in it such as good photo locations for portrait shots, the locations of excellent local bbq places, fun things to see around the area, etc. I take it with me on just about every trip, even when I absolutely know I don’t need it. It’s like a constant companion.
It is not, however, without its issues. The Nuvi 360, while having a delightfully simple interface, lacks in a great many areas. First and foremost, there’s no way to change the route it decides is the best one, even when I know it’s a terrible route, fraught with traffic, blocked roads, or other random perils that the Nuvi has decided are irrelevant. Second, I can’t pre-determine a route I wish to take beforehand, and just load that in, allowing the Nuvi to guide me on my journey from point to point, as a true navigator might. There are other numerous issues, but those are just the main ones. They’re not show-stoppers, but they are imperfections that I’ve just learned to live with that shouldn’t be there for the price I paid.
Its maps are also two years out of date. I’ve looked at the new Nuvi maps and they don’t really add any new information in any area I’ve ever visited or frequented, so I’m not entirely certain what my money would be going toward other than the continued employment of a mapping professional or two.
It is with this in mind that I’ve been somewhat interested in the possibility of a newer GPS system, perhaps with fewer flaws and more updated information.
Since I bought my Nuvi 360, however, the world has exploded with GPS options right and left. It seems that somehow, the world has decided it was never able to survive without a GPS navigation system in its collective mode of transportation, and so it’s clamoured out for any and all to rectify this situation. And rectify they have. Everyone from the old standard GPS three (Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan) to computer makers and cellphone manufacturers have launched GPS devices for cars, bicycles, pedestrians, boating, motorcycles, and every other mode of transport imaginable.
The choices are now staggering. Even in Garmin alone, the options have gone from three (Nuvi 350, 360, and 660), to over 30. TomTom has kept its respectably small lineup, but even it’s grown from a sparse few to a healthy many. And don’t get me started on the random other contenders, which have all tried to be all things to all people — cell phones, mp3 players, GPS devices, web browsers, PIMs, etc. It’s hard enough to make a decision about what GPS is best, but do I need to know how many mp3s it can store? Or whether or not it can sync with MS Exchange?
Having browsed dozens of manufacturers’ products, I’ve decided I don’t like the user interfaces for most of them. I’m back to Garmin and TomTom as my choices, with the Garmin interface being easily more elegant, but lacking in the power that the TomTom’s software holds.
And so I’ve come down to my decision: They don’t make the GPS I want. They make all the features I want in a GPS, but it doesn’t seem to exist in any one GPS model, no matter what price I were to pay.
What I want (and who has it):
1) An elegant interface — Garmin wins out here. The interface is beautifully simple and straight-forward. Everything from being able to touch the map and have it switch to 2D mode automatically, allowing you to drag your finger along where you want the map to go, click a location, select Go To, and then just hit the button to get back to the 3D driving mode where you were, to having all the options you really need out in front and all the ones you don’t carefully hidden out of sight.
2) Categorised points of interest (POIs) — Garmin again. If I want to find a restaurant, I can select food locations, and then choose the type. Italian? Asian? Chinese (Chinese and Asian — somewhat amusing)? Deli? Fast Food? It’s easy to sort amongst the lists to find what I need. The same goes with shopping locations — grocery stores, drug stores, hardware, etc. It makes it incredibly easy to find what you need when you need it.
3) Clever routing options — TomTom. TomTom not only allows me to recalculate portions of a route I know are directions I don’t want to take or that go through areas I don’t want to go through, but its new maps keep track of where people drive and when, and makes routing decisions based on the real life experiences of people actually driving the roads, not just the basic speed limits of each road. While not perfect, it goes a long way toward being an intelligent GPS device.
4) Clear, easy to understand text to speech voices — TomTom again. The Garmin’s TTS voices are muddy, unclear, and there are numerous bugs with how they pronounce streets (any ST is ‘Saint’, any ‘DR’ is ‘Doctor’, etc, etc. Bugs that could have been fixed ages ago had Garmin actually cared to do so, but they only fixed them for one voice set — the American voices, which are arguably the least clear-spoken of all of their TTS voices. It goes to show that, while they claim a global fan base, Garmin is still first and foremost for Americans, and everyone else can just make do). TomTom’s TTS voices are crystal clear.
5) Sharp, clever-looking hardware — Garmin. Sorry, TomTom, but your GPS devices look pretty ugly. Not as ugly as some, I will grant you, but the design is hardly exquisite. And to top it off, TomTom skimps on the supplied accessories. No protective case is included like Garmin (you can buy it for extra money, of course). A very poor suction cup mount is your only real option from TomTom for mounting hardware. And, of course, the device doesn’t get its power via the mount the way it does in the Garmin. It gets its power from an external USB plugin, which makes things cumbersome, fragile, and makes mounting and dismounting the device awkward. Garmin wins hands down for elegance in the hardware category.
6) Easily-updated information — TomTom. TomTom allows you to update POIs — adding or removing them as you need, update road information to show closed roads, newly-opened roads, or roads that are incorrectly labeled in direction (for one way roads). While it doesn’t allow you to input actual road geometry, it comes close to rectifying many of the problems one has with map information that is already out of date by the time it’s released (and some of which that never seems to get updated).
There are a few minor other quibbling things I want here and there, but those are the most important. And it appears to be somewhat of an even split between the Garmin and the TomTom. It’s really a shame that neither one makes a GPS that I would consider perfect, and so I limp along with my old 360 for the time being, hoping that the upcoming year might bring advances from one or the other that would sway me toward an upgrade.