Hey Guys,
I am considering buying my Father a Portable Navigation system for his birthday.

I see Garmin & Magellan & TomTom out there.

Anyone know which of the Basic Models would be a good buy??

Lowrance 500c has a huge touch screen, 20 gig hard drive, MP3 player, SEMA Best New Automotive Electronics product of the year for 2004, voice navigation, large search feature, fully customizable screens, full color, portable, and waterproof.

www.lowrance.com

I am on my second Garmin. I have never even tried the others so they may work just as well.

My Garmin Street Pilot 2620 is touch screen. I take it out of my luggage anywhere in the world, put it on the dash of my rental car, wait for it to acquire satallites, and just punch in the address I want to go to. Simple as that. It will talk to you in several languages, take you there the fastest or shortest way, or just point out the direction. I love it.

From other recommendations on the board I bought a Garmin C320 about 2 months ago and am very happy with it. It can be found for around $300 (I picked mine up from Outpost for $279) has a color touch screen and voice prompts for turns (it doesn't speak the actual road names, I think the C340 does). It only comes with 128mb of memory, good for 1 to 3 states depending on size of the states. I bought a 1gb card for and can get about 3/4 of the US on it. It also has a built-in lithium battery that is supposed to last about 8 hours. I haven't run mine that long on batteries alone, maybe 3 hours at most but the battery indicator never moved.

The Garmin i3 is pretty attractive too, cheaper, smaller screen but no touch option. It has a thumb wheel which I decided would be too difficult to use while driving. The C330 has all the US maps built-in, no need to load them before use but it's about $100 more.

The cons: It ain't perfect, I doubt any of them are. I've played with it in areas I know and sometimes it chooses routes that don't make sense (fuzzy logic). I was in San Francisco last week and it took me on some strange routes coming back from Santa Cruz, we ended up on one lane mountain roads with steep cliff drop-offs (by the way, 1 week in the Bay area and I didn't see any 914's, where were you guys?). Exciting but it took us at least 2 hours out of our way. I would not consider a GPS a replacement for a good map if you're not familiar with an area, just a nice supplement.

I try not to leave my C320 in the car too often (especially a rental) so I usually drop in one of the pockets of my cargo shorts -- it's shaped like a little CRT monitor so it's a bit bulky when you put it in your pocket.

Do some searches as there have been a few threads about GPS models in the last few months.

Hope this helps.

I like my portable navagation device....it's called a map and costs $3.95.

I thought a portable voice response navigation system was a short girlfriend in the passenger seat reading a map .


Andrew

..you MIGHT feel different when you are 71yrs old like my old man, and your wife, because of a bad back & her daily headache (now for 13yrs & counting) is laying down in the back of the van.... sleeping!

I have a Garmin Quest. It's totally awesome and I really like it. It doesn't really have any bad points. They now make a Quest II which has more memory.

http://www.gpsinformation.us/quest/questrev.html

The cool thing about the Quest compared to other units I've seen is that it can also be used on a bike or in walking mode in a city which is great for traveling and sight seeing.

The small units have gotten alot better. I still prefer a laptop though.

Should always have a map but nothing beats seeing exactly where you are on the map.