|
Garmin GPS V 19MB Handheld Navigator
|
| Price: |
Average customer review:
Product Description
The GPS V Deluxe is one versatile navigator that delivers automatic routing, detailed mapping and WAAS capability - all in a compact handheld GPS. It comes with the MapSource City Select CD, which gives you access to detailed street-level maps with locations of restaurants, hotels and other services. Use the GPS V Deluxe to look up a location and it will automatically calculate a route and guide you to your destination with turn-by-turn directions and audible beeps that alert you to upcoming turns. You can even switch the display from horizontal, for mounting on a bike or a vehicle dash, to vertical for handheld use.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #40679 in Consumer Electronics
- Brand: Garmin
- Model: 010-00226-03
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 11.00 pounds
- Native resolution: 256 x 160
Features
- 12-channel GPS unit with 19 MB of built-in memory
- Includes MapSource City Select CD-ROM with street-level maps and points of interest; full unlock capability for US and Canada
- WAAS capability provides position accuracy better than three meters
- Autorouting gives access to the shortest and fastest routes
- Turn-by-turn directions; includes serial cable for PC connection
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Product Description
You'll never get lost again when you use the versatile and powerful GPS V Deluxe from Garmin. This compact global positioning system (GPS) receiver can be mounted in your vehicle or used as a handheld navigator. The GPS V Deluxe coordinates signals from 12 satellites to pinpoint your position anywhere on the globe, and it has WAAS capability.
 Displays current position and bearing. View larger. |
 Focused view of upcoming turn. View larger. |
 Lists upcoming turns with the remaining distance and time. View larger. |
 The GPS V device provides GPS navigation on the road and on foot. |
The included MapSource City Select CD-ROM--designed specifically for the GPS V--has been enhanced to provide street-level views of millions of new streets for nearly every town in the United States. City Select includes highways, interstates, and business and residential streets with attributes such as turn restrictions, speed categories, and other navigation features. The software automatically creates point-to-point routes in MapSource and on the GPS V. It also displays restaurants, hotels, attractions, entertainment, shopping, and location of emergency services along your route. City Select also contains detailed maps of major metropolitan areas in seven defined regions in the U.S. and Canada.
This Deluxe version of the Garmin GPS V offers full unlock capability of all maps for the United States and Canada. (The regular Garmin GPS V comes with unlock capability for just one region.) Simply install the City Select CD-ROM on your PC, then enter a custom code that is included with the product box.
The GPS V Deluxe also comes with auto-routing for the shortest and fastest way to your destination, plus the turn-by-turn directions will direct you throughout North America and major cities. The GPS V Deluxe will show you how to get there, give you an estimated time of arrival, and alert you to upcoming turns with an audible beep.
You view data on the 2.2-by-1.5-inch four-level grayscale LCD, with its resolution of 256 x 160 pixels. A multilevel backlight allows you to see the screen clearly in a variety of lighting conditions. The GPS V comes with detachable antenna, PC interface cable, dashboard mount, 12-volt adapter cable, wrist strap, and owner's manual. --Agen G.N. Schmitz
What's in the Box
GPS V Deluxe GPS receiver, basemap (Americas Autoroute), MapSource City Select CD (North America Only) with full coverage and full unlock, PC interface cable, automotive mount, 12-volt cigarette lighter adapter, wrist strap, and quick start guide.
From the Manufacturer
The GPS V is one versatile navigator that delivers automatic routing, detailed mapping and WAAS capability - all in a compact handheld GPS. It comes with the MapSource City Select CD, which gives you access to detailed street-level maps with locations of restaurants, hotels and other services. Use the GPS V to look up a location and it will automatically calculate a route and guide you to your destination with turn-by-turn directions and audible beeps that alert you to upcoming turns. You can even switch the display from horizontal, for mounting on a bike or a vehicle dash, to vertical for handheld use.
The GPS V offers true turn-by-turn navigation through the use of its auto-routing feature. At the touch of a button, you now have access to the shortest and fastest routes, turn directions, and estimated time of arrival at your intended destination. Along the way, GPS V on-screen prompts alert you to necessary turns, distance to upcoming turns, route deviation, and distance to the final destination.
The GPS V is compact and portable. The unit can be dash-mounted, and operates on four AA batteries or on your vehicle's battery using the included 12-volt power adapter. The GPS V can be easily viewed in any lighting condition, due to its high resolution, four gray-level display and backlit display/keypad. The unit's built-in basemap provides detail for interstates, interstate exit data, highways, rivers and lakes in the United States, Canada and Mexico (no exit data for Mexico), plus major thoroughfares in metropolitan areas.
With the press of a button, the built-in basemap will provide turn-by-turn guidance to a destination via interstates and highways. With downloaded maps from the MapSouce City Select CD-ROM, your GPS V provides turn-by-turn guidance down to the residential street-level detail.
Customer Reviews
Useful and effective but flawed - updated 12/21/2004.
As a personal GPS and especially at walking or sailing speeds the GPS V is fine. The display is OK for casual use and the unit is able to hold the maps for more land or water than you can sail or ride over in a day. If you aren't in a hurry or especially demanding then you should be delighted with this unit. I have it as my primary GPS and it isn't sufficiently problematic that I intend to replace it, I'll soldier on and hope for some software updates for now.
For use in cars and for more demanding users there are some significant drawbacks.
During configuration it takes around an hour to load a full set of maps, 115kbps is not sufficient for loading 19Mb of data in reasonable time. This discourages modifying the map set, which reduces usability if you live round a big city.
The processor performance is borderline. For normal use the low power consumption of a relatively slow processor allows good battery life. For car use the power consumption is not an issue but the time taken to redraw the screen, which can be many seconds, becomes extremely significant. The menus are slow, it can take a couple of seconds to go between two entries in a list and I'm not even using WAAS. Routing also takes some time, mostly this isn't too important because once you are on a route it shouldn't recalculate often.
There are some bugs, which may have been fixed recently. When I upgraded the firmware the unit started dropping out during route calculation. I wrote to Garmin about this but got absolutely no response. That's a mark down for customer support too.
The address entry is cumbersome. In addition, if you don't cancel any other route that was in operation the unit will interrupt and discard your tedious entry if it completes the calculation. If it doesn't then it will start on the new route.
Directions can be slow to paint, the wrong directions are sometimes shown until the unit catches up and swaps over to the correct picture. If one turn follows another fairly rapidly it may not tell you about the second turn until after the turn has passed, this is associated with the slow repaint.
When routing information is shown the native menus of the interrupted screen are not available, so if you have a sequence of directions to follow and wish to do something else the unit keeps interrupting and refusing your menu selections... there are no menu entries in the routing screen.
Perhaps I should have bought a more expensive model, but what could I get that is reasonably portable?
Finally, some of the routes would best be described as 'entertaining' or on a less charitable day 'indirect'. For example, when the route from Via Del Oro via Bernal Road to US 101 is being followed in San Jose CA the directions will sometimes tell you to cross Bernal Road (ignoring the left turn) and then to take three right turns. On other occasions it will indicate the left turn. Routing seems dependant on precise location.
Finally, customer support at Garmin did not respond. I'd be happy to help them make this a better product, but they'd need to be interested.
12/21/2004
Last time I checked there were no further software updates, so it looks like Garmin aren't interested in their legacy customers. That means my next GPS will have to be from someone else.
I found another routing amusement. Returning from the far north of California I didn't include the Marin county maps but I had included Sacramento because I had intended to return on I-5. When I got well down US101 (a mountain range and probably 70 miles off I-5) I was getting crazy arrival times. Eventually I found that at Ukiah it wanted me to turn east and cross to I-5 because I didn't have the detailed map for the next hundred miles of US101 to Richmond where the bay area maps resumed. It should not favor the downloaded maps to this extent.
On the bright side this and my old GPS III+ continue to function almost as advertised. Years of faithful, if slightly eccentric, service.
12/17/05
I now have a Tomtom Navigator 5 and their Bluetooth GPS receiver and iGuidance 2.1.3 for Europe. The newer software and receiver puts this old machine in a better light than you might think. True the SIRF III receiver is significantly better than this old Garmin. It may be old and slow and hard to use compared to the newer machines, but it does have an almost clairvoyant ability to correctly estimate trip times. If you are looking for an instrument that can record tracks and will show you a lot of current data (course, eta, time to destination, altitude, track, bearing to destination, time to next waypoint, distance to next waypoint, altitude, speed, time of day, date, trip distance, trip time, ...) then this will be a lot more use to you than the late 2005 Tomtom and iGuidance software. But for them my PDA has the high detail maps for the entire US, Canada and UK and it took less time to install than it takes to copy half the bay area to this unit.
If I'm heading for the woods or the water this is still the best GPS for me.
Good hardware, mediocre maps
This is the second Garmin GPS I own, the other being an eTrex Vista, and the first with road navigation capabilities. In my previous experience with Garmin, I was happy both with the product and the product support, and I was not disappointed this time. The user interface of the GPS is even more intuitive than the eTrex, and buttons and screen pass the test with flying colors. The software is robust, and it never crashed. Syncing with the PC is a piece of cake, and information such as waypoints can be transferred among different Garmin GPS.
The product is perfect for everyday use, but I have only three complaints. The first two are minor: the location of satellites when the GPS is "cold" can take 60-90 seconds, and the calculation of the best route eassily takes more than 60 seconds when the degree of accuracy is set to medium; much more when the level of accuracy is set to high. The two number could mean that the driver has to wait 2-3 minutes before getting any useful direction from the GPS.
The last gripe is much important: the maps are often inaccurate. Some roads have been permanently cut off at a major intersection; new houses have been built. As a result, the GPS might prescribe an incorrect route, or not be able to find a certain address. These accidents happen about 20% of the time in my area (NY city and surrounding counties). As a way of comparison, the GPS installed on Hertz rental machines, which uses Navtech maps, has never given me an incorrect route during my trips. I hope Garmin will provide better maps soon.
GPS V Deluxe experience from a NeverLost user
My first encounter with GPS is from Hertz car rental about 3 years ago. It helps me to navigate through the dark winding country road of New Jersey in the winter evenings. With turn-by turn voice prompt, it is an amazing tool. The only draw back is the [price] price tag, which is a lot more than I want to pay.
I always wanted a GPS with auto routing feature for my personal trip. The Never Lost cost too much. The Garmin Street Pilot III Deluxe with color screen and voice prompt is the closest alternative to Never Lost. Again it is too costly at $800US and it is too bulky to carry it around.
In Spring/Summer 2002, Garmin markets a GPS V Deluxe version, with all North America regions on CDROM unlocked and price is not much more than a eTrex. The GPS V unit is very similar to Street Pilot III (SPIII). The major difference is that GPS V has a smaller monochrome screen and beeps instead of voice prompt on SPIII.
I have had my GPS V for over 3 months now. I have used in Toronto, southern Ontario region, San Diego California, Cap Code, Boston, Newport Rhode Island, New Heaven Connecticut, Kittery Maine, Washington/Dulles area without major fault.
Over all, I am quite satisfy with the unit when taking price into consideration, but it is not as accurate or fast as Magellan Never Lost.
My GPS V locked up twice in NY State. I could not turn it off. I had to remove the power supply to turn on the unit again.
On I-90, around Albany, NY. The GPS V sensed the vehicle went off-course and recalculate the routing again on two occasions.
In Boston area, the text message instructed me to turn left, but the graphic arrow points to the opposite direction.
Recalculation speed is the major drawback for GPS V. When the vehicle goes off-course (missing a turn), GPS V has the option to automatically recalculate a new route. This can takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depends on the distance to the destination. The Magellan Never Lost usually takes no more than a 5 seconds to put you back on route.
There is major difference between the two when comes to recalculation. Never Lost recalculates to the last point where you went off-course, so you can continue your original routing. Usually Never Lost would prompt you to make a U-turn to go back on the route.
On the other hand GPS V recalculates a new routing base on your current direction. Only on one occasion GPS V suggest making a U-turn to get back to the original routing. All other times, GPS V recalculates a new detour which could be a lot longer than the original route. In GPS V, there is a Setup screen to setup your routing preference such as to avoid U-turn, avoid Toll road and 5 levels of calculation detail. I suppose if you pick the ¡¥Best route¡¦ option, it would take longer to find the optimal route. I took the default setting which do not avoid U-turn, do not avoid Toll road, medium setting for calculating route.
Recalculation and redraw after a turn is very slow especially in Boston downtown where visibility to satellite signals could be very limited due high rise buildings and narrow streets. I often miss next turn because redraw was too slow. In situation like this, I suggest switching to text mode and following text instructions instead.
Both Never Lost and GPS V has excellent Hotel/Restaurant database. Never Lost¡¦s database is more up to date and accurate. Both found my favorite ¡¥Legal Seafood¡¦ and ¡¥McCormick & Schmick¡¦ restaurants and some shopping centres. GPS V has a large Asian restaurant database for Toronto area, restaurant such ¡¥Big Mouth Kee¡¦ and ¡¥Taste of Japan¡¦ can be found in GPS V database.
GPS V¡¦s memory is fixed at 19M which is big enough for the entire Toronto, Hamilton, Niagara Fall, Mississauga, Pickering and North Bay area. But 19M is not big enough for Los Angeles region. To download 19M from PC to the GPS V through serial port at 11500 baud takes almost an hour.
