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What gps?

dukebound85

dukebound85

macrumors Core
Original poster
Jul 17, 2005
19,218
4,342
5045 feet above sea level
Which gps system is the best in your opinion?

I would use it mainly for car but it would be nice but not essential if i could mount in motorcycle and maybe take off road when hiking (do any of the car ones incorportate hiking? if not then id want the car one for sure)

any advice would be great

oh, i have a budget of $350 and $200 is a giftcard to bestbuy, so it has to be availiable at bestbuy i guess is what im saying lol

thanks!
 
I have three actually. An HP Ipaq that carried TomTom Software, a Magellan Crossover unit with both topo and road maps and a Garmin Colorado with just the topo maps.

As far as a crossover unit the Magellan is good, but they have not provided any updates to the maps in about 1.5 yrs. Crossovers are nice because you get both types of maps. I have not tried using the Magellan with the mac much except maybe to get a firmware upgrade.

The newest Garmin is a nice unit it is their top of the line one and Garmin provides a set of applications that work with Mac OS X. I have not loaded any highway Nav maps for it though.

Overall the TomTom stuff running on the HP unit has provided the best road Nav experience and the Garmin is the best with Topo because of all the applications for Geocaching and the like.

In the past while doing a mixed road and trail vacation, I tend to take the Magellan as it is an all in one.
 
I have a garmin gpsmap 60cx that I use for hiking and navigation in my car.
Happy with it. Works with a Mac as well.
 
ok so ive narrowed it down to the 650 and 660

anyone have a prefernece? its only a 50 dollar diff between the two and the 660 has a hard drive, ac adapter, 90 day trial for traffic and weather updates, fm transmitter and bluetooth

other than that they are the same feature wise
 
I have a Garmin Nuvi 680 and it is great. I have had no problems with it at all. I have updated it 3 times with Macs, one running 10.4.11 and one with 10.5.2. I have also added custom vehicles and music, so it does work very well with Macs. The only difference between the 680 and 660 is that the 680 has an MSN Direct adapter in the charger so it can receive traffic information.

This is my first non-car GPS unit so I may not be a really credible source on what is good, but it does work very well with Macs and Garmin has a few Mac applications to go with it.
 
I have the Garmin 660 and I love it. We had a Magellan when we were in Amsterdam and it didn't tell you to turn until we were in the middle of the instersection. Stick with Garmin.
 
just to help you out

Tomtom have 90 Satellties
garmin 25
and the other company (forgot the name) has 14

it might help your decision

found it out when buying dads gps :)
 
smogsy said:
Tomtom have 90 Satellties
Click to expand...
Yeah, but their maps are crap for the US. The number of sats is probably what they use worldwide, not what's available to you at any one location.

I had a TomTom for a couple years and got rid of it early this year after giving up on it being reliable, even though I bought updated maps every year. I had to print paper backup maps anytme I went anywhere becuase of the constant navigation errors.

The Garmin 760 that replaced it is far superior. Directions are very reliable, and the maps have many nearly all the addresses I use that were missing in the TomTom. And it acquires the GPS satellites faster and more reliably -- so much for TomTom's 90 satellites.

Garmin 760 has had great reviews and I saw it was down to $400 on Amazon recently (I paid closer to $500).
 
Having " 90 satellites" is a marketing ploy and a rather funny one at that. The amount of those orbiting friendlies in the sky for viewing by a single receiver is small at any one time.

Even a military aircraft flying at 30,000 feet can only lock on to so many at one time. ( Some are on the other side of the earth ) Even if you have the ability to see more satellites you are still limited by the amount of channels in the device. Most consumers have 12, maybe 16 channels to deal with, the military has 24 so that some of them can be encrypted.

Still, having owned Garmin, TomTom and Magellan...I like them all
 
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