Four years ago, my wife upgraded from a purple Sunfire that I refused to be seen driving. We got her a shiny new car THAT IS NOT PURPLE, and she insisted on the built-in nav system. First I laughed at her. I mean, she married a human compass. Then I fought her, because, come on – $1100 for a nav system?! She won. And I will deny ever saying this if confronted, but we’ve used the nav system like crazy. We turn the car on and the nice lady tells us where to go. “Destination is. Ahead. On the left.”
Fast forward four years and her car’s GPS is the s l o w e s t and dumbest GPS on the road, and now all of the maps are old. Acura has a real sense of humor, so they’ll sell us a $190 cd to update the maps. “Lipstick on a pig” comes to mind. I think it’s time to cut our losses and get a low-cost, portable GPS with all of the bells and whistles that science intended. I’m really liking the Garmin nuvi 255 Automobile GPS at TheNerds.net for just $135 right now. The price is very right. It retails around $190 and has the features to justify it. Turn-by-turn spoken directions in a clear voice, super-fast route recalculations (hallelujah), 3.5″ touch screen navigation, upload addresses directly to your Garmin from Google Maps or Mapquest, and OPTIONAL service that works with MSN Traffic for real-time traffic updates. It even uses text-to-speech to read local street names, and this is a huge plus over the generic directions our old nav system uses. “Take the second left turn” just doesn’t sound as confident as “take a left on Williamson Ave”. A nice safety feature is the “where am I?” feature that tells you your location by street address, city, state, zip code, nearest intersection and coordinates, very important if you need emergency services.
Overall, this is FAST, very portable, and covers all of the features you’ll actually use without adding extra size or dollars for features that will just collect dust. Eat that, Acura.
Cheers!
Jack
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