Looking for a new Sat nav for the car as the old Garmin shat it’s self. Wasn’t really thast impressed with the Garmin to be honest. We bought a Tom tom but took it back 2 days later as it couldn’t even find our house number (after the updates and the house has been here since the 30’s ). I also opened the trip planner on the tom tom….what a load of rubbish! I want something that lets you plan your own route, do they exist? Seen the Mio 685 and that seems pretty good for the money and apparently has a trip planner. Anyone got any advise?

Cheers

Dan

You’ve discounted the two most popular units. FWIW my Garmin has served me well for the past 6 years. My view is that the SatNavs are great at finding your way around cities and for traffic info but for big picture route planning a map is still the best. What phone do you have, plenty of people use their smartphones and they can allow you to plan your own route.

Phones are good but you don’t always get signal on your phone, no signal no map?

+1 for not a garmin, mine’s shockingly bad

For example:
Heading south on the M1 it can’t figure out which is the M1 and which is the M62, it tells you to go on the M62, then tells you you’ve got it wrong and sends you through Barnsley, no one should ever go to Barnsley 😛

The detour function sends me round in circles back to the closed road I was trying to avoid.

Rather than go down the A404 between the M40 and M4 it sends you up the sliproads, round each roundabout, and rejoins again.

When leaving a motorway it gives the instruction “take the exit on the left, then at roundabout” THEN AT ROUNDABOUT WHAT, WHAT WHATTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Then once you’ve stoped at the roundabout it gives the instruction, usually to be in a lane 3 lanes away or as above, to re-join the main road.

It doesn’t know half the villages in Yorkshire, and my parents road isn’t on there either.

It won’t navigate between England/Wales/Scotland without explicit instructions to do so.

The postcode/address search is useless, the TomTom one is far more intuitive.

Despite being supposedly based on OS mapping, it’s always been out of date.

The find point of interest menu never finds anything interesting or has settings like the TomTom for nearest/nearest to route/nearest to destination.

It gets one way streets and bus lanes consistently wrong

The directions are late (or sometimes far to early) and the screen lags, so when driving around town it’s a lottery whether you pick the right street or not. The same applies at motorway junctions, if there are 2 sliproads within half a mile of each other it says take the junction on the left, but the screens to zoomed in to make it clear that it’s the 2nd one you want, not the first, I’ve ended up in Swindon far to often as a result, it’s a bit like Barnsley.

The screen seems to zoom in/out at just the wrong moment, e.g approach a roundabout, slow down, the sceen zooms in so you cant see where to go at the f******* roundabout!

The route calculator is hugely flawed, I can usually guess a quicker and shorter route than it can! E.g. to get to Calke Abbey (Ticknall, South of Derby) form the M1 southbound, you can either take the A50, then the A514, hit no traffic ever and get there in 10-15 minutes. Or you can take the A52, why you would want to I’ve no idea, it adds quite a bit of distance to the journey and goes through Derby city center so the trafic is always at a standstill!

Are you listening Garmin, your sat-navs are s***.

My Garmin is superb. 5-ish years old, reliable, easy to use, Bluetooth hands free works well, only twice has it ever sent me the wrong way, and I know from my Garmin bike computer that their backup is brilliant.

I’ve always used Garmin without a problem. I used the Sat Nav this week to take me from Leeds via the M62/M1 to various places around Barnsley, Royston and other places around there and not surprisingly it got me door to door with clear instructions. It must be because my Garmin is set to English as that is my spoken language. I might try a different language that I don’t speak next time for a challenge and see if it gets me lost too like thisisnotaspoon.

I’ve got TomTom on my iPhone and it works flawlessly, I can’t really fault it. On the other hand, my girlfriend’s Garmin standalone unit is terrible by comparison. Difficult viewfinder which shows where you’ve been rather than where you’re going, hard to choose a route, insensitive touchscreen. To top it off, the battery lasts about 10 seconds when unplugged (I.e. if you nudge the cigarette lighter).

Get the iPhone TomTom software (think it’s about £60) plus a cheap cradle and cable off ebay (£7 ish) and it’ll be better than most standalone units that cost four times as much. Of course this assumes you already have an iPhone, but that’s a fair assumption these days. The only downside is that it takes up 500Mb of space on the phone. I can live with that.

+1 for phone + cradle (especially cradle with a GPS receiver). I have a Tomtom go 1000 atm and am beginning to hate it. It works great as a satnav but there are so many known issues with them (rebooting, failing to get a gps lock etc.) and I can’t for the life of me get the thing to update now despite trying on 3 different PCs. Just reading the Tomtom support forums is enough to put you off buying one.

I have an Iphone but surely you must get problems when you don’t have signal? Or do they run off something else?

I just use Google nav on my Android ‘phone. Worked fine directing me in the UK all over the place and even in Madrid earlier in the year. I find it uses very little data and with the latest updates it seems to cache a good portion of the map on the ‘phone. Worked fine in areas of the highlands with poor reception.
The Streetview thing coming on when you get to your destinantion is quite nice too.

Google Nav on my phone is certainly the best I’ve used in terms of being able to follow it blindly, but the very basic Garmins that we have in the works vans works pretty well but do require some thought.

Android phone + cradle + CoPilot.

CoPilot is £20 on the market and offers full offline functionality. I find it every bit as good as my old Garmin or TomTom, probably better.

edit: hmmm, there seems to be a free version now too… not sure what the limitation is from the paid version.

Phones are good but you don’t always get signal on your phone, no signal no map?

They don’t use the phone/Internet signal. I use CoPilot and it’s never let me down. It includes speed camera alerts and Uk & Ireland maps.

They don’t use the phone/Internet signal.

So what do they use?

They use the internal memory or SD card where the maps are stored, like a normal sat nav

So when you are using the sat nav app and a call comes through does it close the app? Can you have the music on your phone running at the same time? Basically what are the pro’s and cons of the iphone as a sat nav. Thinking of Co pilot.

tom tom forever teamed up with common sense you can not go wrong

Take a look at Navigon , been happy with mine over the last 18 months .

Another vote for navigon, got 2 which have worked flawlessly even in the notoriously bad Edinburgh one way system.

We bought a Tom tom but took it back 2 days later as it couldn’t even find our house number

Ok so a minor thing just add it via the map or click when you are at home to add it and pop your toys back in the pram.
Not been anywhere in the UK that TomTom couldn’t find.

Had one with traffic extras and that was great. Once the traffic updates came on it sorted out the route – only downside is it may try and send you to unmonitored roads in really bad traffic but will ask first – ie use common sense before accepting diversion

Mobile with Offline sounds good but depends how much storage you have. I also found that running full screen on with voice commands and GPS meant that even being on charge the battery was getting low by the end of the journey.

Best of both is a Sat Nav with bluetooth if you drive/talk a lot.

Form talking to others though the OS in sat navs seem to either work for you or they don’t (Left/right side of brain type thing) for me Tom Tom is very straight forward for others it’s not.

My Choice for high miles and busy roads is the TomTom IQ range

So when you are using the sat nav app and a call comes through does it close the app? Can you have the music on your phone running at the same time? Basically what are the pro’s and cons of the iphone as a sat nav. Thinking of Co pilot.

CoPilot here too. When a call comes in, it just rings over the top of the app; when call ends, it returns to app. I believe it can run music at the same time; I use a standalone iPod for music as I find the FM transmitter doesn’t play well with the phone.

I’ve not had a problem with CoPilot – once I got my iphone 4. It was terribly slow on the old 3G. Well, one tiny problem – the lane guidance image that (can be set to) appear when on a motorway approaching a junction is a ‘daytime’ colour scheme only. At night, with the nighttime colour scheme running, and the dash lights dimmed – it’s like a small nuclear explosion on the dashboard.

Also, take the time to set it up with route preferences. Mine started on ‘shortest’ as default so would look for every tiny road to get there. Set to something sensible, like preferring motorways or whatever, and setting it to the speeds I actually drive has ended up with it being pretty accurate on times and routes.

It does chew through the battery on the phone quickly, so be sure to get a decent USB adaptor.

It does chew through the battery on the phone quickly, so be sure to get a decent USB adaptor.

So do some adapters charge better than others?

Well, I bought a couple of cheapish ‘works with iphone’ chargers. One continually disconnected and reconnected, and the other just didn’t work. Ended up with a Griffin Power Jolt Duo