Customer Reviews

Garmin City Navigator Europe NT - UK/Ireland (010-10691-00)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We just got back from Ireland. This Garmind UK and Ireland City Navigator SD card turned out to be essential to the enjoyment of our trip. It is more difficult than you can imagine, to sit in the right side of the car, driving on the left side of extremely narrow and twisting roads, including round-abouts (like a rotary, but going in the opposite direction) with multiple exits, and few street name signs. If we had been using paper maps, it would have been very difficult, as there were few shoulders on the roads, so there would have been no place to pull over to look at a map. A few times I did pick a wrong road, when the Garmin was running just a hair behind on the map, from where we physically were, but it immediately corrected the error. We never got lost, whether we were driving in a larger city, or on almost a cow path in the country side. This probably saved us some arguments about getting lost, and certainly reduced the stress in navigating.

At times the Garmin was slower than normal to load maps and find satellites, but no matter that the sky was normally cloudy, it did work. However, we did find that the POI's were severely lacking, and even some of the towns did not exist on the Garmin. Even so, just for the ease in navigating, it was worth it. So order one of these SD cards and take your trip in confidence.

PS. the Guinness Beer is much better than any Guinness you can get on tap in the United States. Also, the pubs are the place to do your eating. The atmosphere is quaint, and the food is hardy and reasonably priced. Have a great trip.

Amazon had a great price for this chip. It was approximately half the price on the Garmin site. The GPS did recalculate occasionally, but this was not a big issue. This beat the heck out of trying to read a map of the tiny little roads in the irish coutryside (with surprisingly fast speed limits). I recommend this product.

Great product in general, but as is typical with Garmin's databases, it is years out of date, and does not have sufficient information about road types. This results in poor decisions regarding best routes to take which can have annoying or disastrous consequences in Ireland. We just finished (7/3/09) using the latest version of this product in conjunction with a Garmin 260W GPS on an 11-day, 1200 mile trip.

Ireland's roads are narrow in the extreme -- single lane rural roads are often two-way and lined with stone walls -- and poorly marked, so the database is crucial in confirming routes and giving positions. Unfortunately the system very often chooses poor routes, particularly near towns and cities because of its lack of current information and information about road type. In all fairness, the database had a wealth of information about small, rural tracks that might not be present on many paper maps, and made traveling some of the coastal roads much easier.

Ireland's recent economic boom has resulted in faster bypass routes and roads near most of the large cities, but the database does not reflect these. The older routes inevitably run through the congested market centers of towns, and slow travel by many hours.

Many of the new "dual carriageway" (divided highway) roads are not present in the database. This can lead to a great deal of confusion when trying to decipher the signage while getting conflicting information from the GPS, and can result in choosing slow, congested roads while watching traffic whiz by on a nearby freeway.

Missing a turn and allowing the GPS to reroute you may have you bouncing through the countryside on a single-track farm road since the database does not discriminate between road types. This has limited amusement value. Further, when returning to Dublin from Donegal, it routed us through Northern Ireland on slow, rural roads rather than a less-direct but much faster route via new freeways slightly more south that did not require crossing the border.

RECOMMENDATION: The best navigational method we developed was to have a current paper map purchased in Ireland (even these may be somewhat out of date) with a sharp pair of eyes helping the driver and looking for signs, and the GPS suggesting routes but always giving the position to confirm where we were. We were able to choose much faster routes when necessary this way.

All of the other comments about the joys of travel in Ireland are spot-on. It's a wonderful place to travel.

We used the UK/Ireland map in Ireland for two weeks and must admit that it saved us a great deal of time in finding our way. The many small roads in Ireland most often do not have identifying signs and the GPS was accurate in most cases in directing us.

The one fault I would say the maps have would be the failure to differntiate between the types of local roads. Some roads we were directed to were not often used for vehicles and a better route was located nearby (as we found out from locals).

Driving in Ireland can be challenging for Americans because you are driving on the left side of the road, from the right side of the car, with manual transmission, and with poorly marked roads. I know the roads pretty well after many trips but bought this product anyway for my last trip. It worked great both in cities and rural areas. It helped me find shortcuts through cities that I'd heard about but never tried before. The only issue is in rural areas where it will sometimes take you down a very narrow road that only the local farmers would use, when you'd be better off staying on the main road. Overall, I highly recommend this product because you can relax and enjoy the drive without worrying about whether you missed the turn.

Just as advertised, you pop the SD card into the SD slot on your Garmin, and lo and behold, suddenly you can see all the streets in the entire UK (England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales... am I missing anything?). Someone commented that they thought their Garmin was a little slower when reading the maps from the card instead of the internal memory - that may be true, but I couldn't really tell since we were moving so slowly that it kept up with our needs.

GARMIN CITY NAVIGATOR NT UK & IRELAND ON MICRO SD CARD

Product worked great - slid the chip into my Garmin and put 2000 miles on the rental car driving around Ireland.

Complaint - NO instructions or help information in with the product.

We recently went to Ireland for 7 days and relied upon our Garmin as we toured in a rental car. The roads are not always well-marked and the UK/Ireland Plug & Play saved the day more than once. Be aware that there are times you wind up "recalculating" more than you want, and some of the newest motorways are not on this version but all-in-all money well spent!

Was travelling to the UK .. I have a Garmin C 330 and wanted the UK maps got them for 1/2 price and they worked well .. The Garmin did take a long time to initially 'acquire satelle' and was constatntly 'recalculating' but it did get us there

We drove a lot of English roads in 10 days and I can only remember one time where the maps were off a little.