Re: Recommend an in-car GPS

Wolfy 'Dial-up' Wildeblood wrote:
> Last time I was driving around in SA, I took a wrong turn-off and
> added over 100 km to my trip. Sucks d00d. I figure I could do with one
> of them GPS thingies before I go back there again. (Those SAians could
> learn a bit about sign-posting, too.) Anyone care to recommend a GPS?
> 
 From the perspective of someone who provides sup****t to a 
fairly large fleet with assorted brands/models of GPS here's 
my 2.2c with GST.

Tomtom - Most user friendly / easy to use. Fairly reliable, 
but if something does go wrong, turnaround time on repairs 
is typically 1-2 months. Impossible to get technical sup****t 
except by email and that is very slow. While the unit is 
away, ability to check it's status is practically 
non-existant (send an email and the unit will probably be 
returned before you get a response).

Navman - Reasonably user friendly. Not as reliable as 
tomtom. Turnaround time for repairs is 2-3 months. You can 
call tech sup****t, but expect waits of 2-3 hours.

Garmin - not as user friendly as Tomtom & Navman, but by far 
the most reliable of the units. If a unit does fail, it will 
be repaired normally within 1 week.

Mio - Quite user unfriendly. Small letters on screen make it 
quite difficult to enter addresses for people with larger 
fingers. Reasonably reliable units, although occasionally 
they will sieze up / lose synch etc. A reset solves the 
issue. They are repaired by Navman's repairer, and 
consequently the same turnaround times.

Uniden - Not real user friendly. Frequent lockups, but no 
actual faults so can't re****t on repair times.

As for all brands, they all have the same sensis maps, which 
to be blunt, are ****house. Suburban developments that are 
5-10 years old are completely missing, while they have quite 
a few roads listed that don't exist. The units will 
generally get you around cities and major regional areas ok 
- but be prepared to ignore some of it's instructions and 
force it to recalculate, because they will frequently try to 
put you through prohibited turns,wrong way up a one way 
street, make you turn over a barrier, etc. In country areas, 
it has to be treated with a grain of salt, because they will 
continually try to send you up roads that don't exist, or 
are nothing more than a stock-route etc.