I've been in the market for a portable GPS navigator and will be posting my results. I don't have much to compare it to other than the built-in GPS in my wife's 2004 Acura MDX. I find it very intuitive and easy to use as well as accurate. I also used the MapQuest mobile application on my Blackberry 8800 which provides maps from Tele-Atlas and turn-by-turn navigation. It was free and I found it useful. But slow to track a satellite and Blackberry screen was too small to use as a navigation device.
I'll be testing the following 3 devices:
- TomTom Go 720
- Magellen Maestro 4250
- Garmin Nüvi 350/360 or 650/660 (undecided)
Other than basic navigation features, I'm going to rate on the following:
- Design
- User Interface
- Ease of Use
- POI database
- Configurability
- Accuracy
- Value
As manufacturers try to justify their new models, they seem going a bit out of control creating a converged device. I think there are some useless features on some GPS devices that I didn't really take into consideration:
- Bluetooth: Not sure why one wants to use their GPS devices as a speakerphone. Plus there's a lot of limitation on which handset they can connect even if your handset had bluetooth.
- MP3 player: I've got one of these already. It's called an iPod.
- Media capability: Not sure I'd want to watch my picturs and videos on my GPS device.
- Traffic: I think this should be free. Too expensive after the trial period is over. Plus I don't think real time traffic is that reliable yet.
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