GPS Evaluation

… or, “Sheila, Revisited” 

So we (I) bought a portable GPS while in California, as I was fed up with a dearth of GPSes available from various car rental companies out of San Jose. We picked up a Garmin nuvi 260w, which …

… doesn’t play music.
… doesn’t act as a wireless BlueTooth telephone receiver.
… doesn’t recommend places to eat.
… doesn’t automatically track traffic (for a hefty monthly fee).
… doesn’t hold, out of the box, street maps for the Seven Continents.
… doesn’t turn down my bed, toast my bread, or pick up my child from school.

But since that’s not what we were looking for from a GPS, that’s fine. Granted, all of those things do seem to be what everyone on the market is looking for, based on what the higher-end models provide. But … not us.

So, for $250 or so at Best Buy, we got a GPS that …

… has a wide screen.
… is portable, fitting pretty easily in a shirt pocket.
… has street maps and feature points for North America.
… speaks the names of cities and streets (sometimes with amusing results)
… does many different languages and three English accents (US/Canada, Australia, Britain) for both genders.
… knows how to find the nearest ARCO, Trader Joe’s, In-n-Out, or rest stop.
… knows how to guess ETAs (based on minimal traffic, but extrapolated as you start to be slowed down).
… tracks for trips average speeds, max speeds, stopped time vs running time, miles covered, etc.

And, by and large, it works.

Good points:

1. It does all of the above.
2. Battery life is actually very reasonable. On the drive down from NoCal, we did not use her continuously, but we did use her quite a bit, and the batteries lasted well. She comes with a car charger, and I bought a home charger as a separate item.

Bad points:

1. Sometimes the pronunciation is a bit off (esp. when you choose the Aussie or Brit accent and then give it Spanish-based names or names with hard G’s — e.g., “Geyserville” was pronounced with a “Jee” at the beginning, and “In-n-Out Burger” was more like “merger”).
2. The lack of traffic knowledge means that Sheila (our pet name for the standard Aussie voice) will gleefully send you down I-5 through LA and Orange Counties at rush hour. (On the other hand … hefty monthly fee on units that do have such knowledge; reasonable if your business requires it, superfluous if not.)
3. Like most GPSes, she does run into problems losing satellite lock in tunnels, in skyscrapered cityscapes, or next to tall hills. She also occasionally gets confused as to which street you’re own when streets criss-cross in parallel. You get used to this quickly, though.
4. The speaker is pretty good volume-wise (though an exterior volume dial would be nice, rather than menu/touch-screen driven). But it’s tinny, making the female voices much more practical.

Our current choice of voices are Sheila (Aussie), Sarah (English), and Suzie (American). We sometimes change between them, but Sheila’s voice carries best. There is also a very sexy (we are informed) French-Canadian Male voice, but he’s a bit harder for us to understand.

We found Sheila very handy in plotting out routes to places we didn’t know where to go, aside from an address. She was also great for spotting upcoming gas stations, specific stores, etc. 

We will probably not carry her with us in the car all the time, but any time we might have gone to MapQuest to print something out to take us somewhere, we’ll likely instead bring her along. And I’ll probably bring her on business trips, etc. We haven’t figured out if, or how, we’ll mount her in one car of the other, or if we’ll simply keep her loose and free (and slightly less convenient to use).

Supposedly Sheila lets you store pictures, convert currency, know what time it is around the world, etc., but we haven’t (and likely won’t) use those features.

Garmin provides updated atlases for $90. At first I thought this would be an infrequent (like every few years) purchase, but the Points-of-Interest database would seem the most time-sensitive, and has proven to be pretty useful, so we’ll see.

Overall: good purchase, glad we got it, and I’m sure we’ll get our money’s worth out of it.