BubbaJon

I love my GPS's but I'm sort of fed up with their limitations. Perhaps I can list things I like and hate and y'all can recommend something I can be happy with.
TomTom
Hate list:

• I'm in my friend's driveway and I mark it. I can't return to it because it's not exactly on a road. This is unbelievably stupid.
• Routing isn't as good as others
• Menu system sucks - sometimes I feel like I've gone down the rabbit hole and no easy way back (besides endless back buttons)
• In Texas we get a lot of addresses that refer to interstates and direction - Like 13505 I-35 N. The TomTom is useless for these. It also has a tough time with county roads (CR), farm to market (FM), and other designations. Most times I cannot find the road in teh database and they've been in existance forever so it isn't a current map issue. The Garmin I put in 1423 and it will find it regardless of nomenclature.
• Map updates suck. In 3 updates in three different units there have never been enough internal memory. So what happens is internal memory gets corrupted which means I have to run off the card. Unacceptable.
• No reasonable routing function so I can plan a route I want to take and load it into the unit.
• No sub-types on POI's. Garmin will let me pick what *type* of restaurant I want. Also no clear idea of which way the POI lies from my current trajectory.
• Absolutely primitive mounting with an obtrusive power cord - they could have at least made it low profile or into the rear of the unit at an angle.
• When getting a favorite - give me the option to sort by distance or name. Sometimes I'm coming at a favorite from a new direction and it would be nice to have ZZ Top BBQ at the top since I'm close rather than scroll the whole list.

Love list:

• Easy - VERY easy - entry of custom POI's.
• POI's are visible from any zoom level. Easily my favorite thing about these units being able to see there's a Costco 2 blocks over in a strange town, or a BofA ATM on my current route.
• The ability to take a route and avoid the parts I don't want to take. Very useful when I feel like avoiding a section of interstate when riding my motorcycle. Much better than Garmins brain-damaged detour.

Garmin Nuvi 750
Hate list

• Mostly good routing but occasionally I get utterly bizarre routing that occasionally has me literally in the middle of somebody's back yard on a dead end road in rural Georgia (serious happened at 2 AM).
• Brain damaged POI's and the methods to get them in your unit.
• Without tricks such as alerts, you cannot get a POI to simply show up on the unit. I WANT to see POI's as I'm tooling down the road and it should not involve tricks, dark secrets and incantations to get them. Even when you do teh special tricks they are not reliable and do not show at all zoom levels. This is a major pet peeve with Garmin is their crappy POI implementation.
• Keyboard is ok but could use a better placed and larger space bar.
• When doing a POI find it seems stupid to have to specify a city/state every damned time. Make it an option to change the City and state and otherwise assume it's from my position. This really gets to be a PITA when a metro region can contain several little burgs all rolled together. An example is here in Austin - if I'm in Round Rock or Pflugerville and I'm looking for a specific BBQ joint - it won't find them if I specify Austin. When you're in a strange town you don't necessarily know the details. Gimme the closest Mel's BBQ ok?
• Brain damaged detours. I've had this thing literally route me off an exit and right back on the same road when I asked it to get me a detour. I love TomTom's system - copy it!

Love list:

• The mounting system is perfect. Make it a standard. Seems like way more connector pins than necessary but that's ok. The quick connect and disconnect without fiddling with power cables too is awesome. Makes the Garmin my choice unit for my motorcycle for this feature alone.
• Routing. It's accurate for the most part and tells me which side of the road if it can tell.
• I can upload routes. they are limited and can use improvements but it's there.
• The trip info screen. Awesome for my motorcycle having a GPS speedo, trip, min max average speed. Excellent! Too bad they couldn't overlay this info over the route/map.
• Excellent ability to understand where I want to go when obscure county and special road nomenclature is involved. Better than most in my experience as I can usually just type in the number and it gives me reasonable options to select from. Not always but usually.
• Love the subtypes on restaurants and also the direction from my current trajectory. This is one good thing about their POI's I like.
• Just thought of another one; the Garmin is smart enough to get the street number first so it can helpfully eliminate streets it cannot be when offering educated guesses. Cool! Tom Tom you have to guess is that on east or west SomeStreet?

So there's my like/dislike list. Is there a unit out there I can have it all? So many folks out there getting into the business I can't keep up and don't have teh time to read *everything*.
Thanks!
Jon

sviking

What is so "brain damaged" about getting custom POIs into your 750? It's pretty much an easy "no brainer" using the free Garmin POILoader utility with my 660.

You seriously have to enter a city/state EVERY time you search for a POI? I find that hard to believe because we have several Nuvis (and an old Street Pilot) in the family and NONE of them do that. I have to hit "NEAR" to force it to search an area other than the default immediate local area. In your example of wanting to find the nearest Mel's BBQ, I just select "food/lodging" -> "food" -> "all food" -> "spell", and then start spelling the name. Quite simple really and it always defaults to a nearest -> farthest search from my current position.

BubbaJon

I hope my terminology doesn't rile you folks but yes - IMHO it is brain damaged compared to other units such as the mentioned TomTom. My biggest beef is that Garmin chooses not to show the POI's to me unless I use tricks - which are indeed arcane like telling it that it's a speed camera and changing alerts, proximities and such - and they don't always work after all that! TomTom does it with aplomb. Also I've had issues with POILoader and the many sources for POI's out there - it's too picky about the format. Again TomTom handles it with aplomb.
I was however less than accurate with my assertion on specifying the state - that is when I'm entering an address - not a POI. Each and every time it will ask me the city.
In fact I mostly like the way Garmin searches for POI's - my biggest beef, as mentioned, is showing them. I also wish it would/could integrate the custom POI's with the main listings - seems like they expect too much effort on the part of the user to go digging around to find stuff.

In any case - I'm not the least interested in this turning into a defend the honor of "X GPS" thread - I want serious suggestions as to a GPS that fits MY bill. I don't really care if my opinions on the capabilities of the mentioned GPS's match somebody else's perceptions or if they know a trick. Point is I want a GPS that has the features I described as loving and not the ones I described as hating - or as many as possible of my list anyway. I should be able to use it without tricks or a menu system that feels like I'm playing Zork.

sviking

Ok then, whatever... Good luck.

I do wish the Nuvis did search the custom POIs as part of a normal search, however.