Garmin City Navigator Europe NT for Detailed Maps of Eastern and Western Europe (DVD)

by Garmin

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 6.8 x 0.8 inches ; 6.4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000MN8R5A
• Item model number: 010-10887-00
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)

Product Description

With over 2.2 million points of interest and 8.9 million kilometers of road coverage throughout the continent, City Navigator Europe NT delivers all the data you need to navigate Europe. Now offering new country coverage of Iceland and new detailed coverage for the Azores Islands, along with increased coverage for Croatia and increased address coverage for France and Italy. City Navigator brings you the most detailed street maps available so you can navigate with exact, turn-by-turn directions to any address or intersection. You can also route to restaurants, petrol stations, lodging, attractions and more. Powered by NAVTEQ, a world leader in premium-quality digital map data.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

96 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some helpful hints, September 30, 2008

By 

TheFuzz (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Garmin City Navigator Europe NT for Detailed Maps of Eastern and Western Europe (DVD) (Software)

The registration really isn't a nightmare - inside the packaging there's a leaflet with a 8 character coupon code. When you run the DVD, make sure you're online, have your Garmin unit plugged in and powered on, choose to get a 25 character unlock code, enter the 8 character coupon code when prompted and away you go.

As for getting maps onto the Garmin unit, what I did was,

- Run the MapSource program (either runs automatically or it'll be in the Windows Start menu under "Garmin"). Yes, it's not pretty but it does the job.
- Select the whole map of Europe. Use the map select tool (a button on the MapSource toolbar that looks like a polygon with a yellow glow) and drag over the whole image of Europe. Storing all of the maps requires about 1400MB total. You can also select/de-select sub-regions of the map.
- Choose the menu option. "Transfer->Send to device". Now, you have a choice of storing maps in your unit's internal memory (appear in the list as a "nuvi" device) or an SD card that you might have in the unit (appears as a separate device in the list, something like "H:"). My unit had maps of North America pre-installed when I bought it. When I tried to transfer the maps of Europe to the internal memory, it told me that I had only about 500MB-ish available. So, I transferred the maps to the 4GB SD card instead.
- Go watch that episode of "The Wire" that you've been meaning to get round to. Indexing and downloading takes a while.
- You're done! It's really not bad at all - just accept that if you want to store maps in the unit's internal memory, there's a limited amount of space available so you'll probably just want to store the countries that you're travelling to. Otherwise, get a nice SD card (you should check the Garmin website to see if your unit can take 4GB SD cards, or only up to 2GB) and put the maps on there.

45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Maps - but the install, could they make it more difficult, June 10, 2009

By 

Daniel G. Lebryk (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Garmin City Navigator Europe NT for Detailed Maps of Eastern and Western Europe (DVD) (Software)

The reason you are thinking of this product is a trip to Europe. You purchased a Garmin GPS with only the NA maps on it. And now you want to navigate Europe during your next vacation. Well, this is the exactly right software to buy. The detail Garmin gives for Europe is absolutely stunning. In major cities every single street in existence is here. The maps will get you where you need to go, even those hidden treasures. Remember, European cities don't change all that much over the years. It's the highways leading in and out that change - but that little bistro in Paris, the great pasta in Rome, the awesome reindeer in Stockholm, that pub you love in London - they haven't moved for years, their address is still the same. So yes, go ahead and buy this software. It's expensive, obscenely expensive - but you will never get lost.

August 2, 2009 Update: Lane Assistance DOES NOT work with this map set. I have this loaded on a Garmin Nuvi 765T which does lane assistance in NA. During this trip to France, nowhere did lane assistance appear (Paris would have been the most likely or the French highway system - never showed up once). There is also no 3D data for those lovely sort of 3D buildings you get in major NA cities. A tip for anyone using this in Paris - drive slowly, have a good idea of where you are going before you drive, and expect a lot of recalculating - new streets come up very very fast. Its easy to miss those streets. Nuvi does a graceful job of recalculating your trip. One last tip - use google maps to search for your destination, once found use the "Send" function in the map balloon to send that location to your GPS (it works like magic).

Oh but the install. Watch out. No it's not a nightmare, but it is not intuitive.
1) If you have a low priced Garmin that does have an SD slot - consider buying an inexpensive 1 or 2Gb SD card. Simple enough and will set you back no more than twenty dollars. That will mean you will never run out of storage space for the maps. Performance will be identical to the unit memory or the SD card. So spring for an SD card.
2) The current shipping version of this software is City Navigator NT 2010, and yes it is the correct version. The list price on Amazon is different from the list price at Garmin (so you might think this is the wrong software). Amazon offers a really good discount over the Garmin site. Take advantage.
3)Install:

a)The program on the DVD installs a program called Mapsource on your computer. Once the install has happened, no sofware was put on your Garmin yet.

b)The next step is to run MapInstall (you'll have to chase after that in your start menu under Garmin). The first thing it will tell you, Navigator Europe NT is locked. Plug in your GPS and wait until windos says the unit is conencted. Click on the "unlock on line." Your browser should find your GPS. You then enter the serial number from your GPS (it's on the GPS label right in front of you) and the Letter Number code from the back of the DVD package. Then click on Unlock. On the website, you will get a message that the maps are unlocked.

c) Next Step is where all h e double hockey sticks can break loose. If you are lucky and Garmin isn't monkeying with their website, the software will unlock and all will be good. Back at MapInstall, click OK, and the software will be unlocked. If you have the bad luck I did, the software will remain locked. One hour on hold and two support people later, the software support person walked me through the MyGarmin Website to find the Unlock Code number. If this happens to you - go to MyGarmin, log in, click on the MyMaps tab. Find your GPS, click on Details. Now a very detailed window will open, and the 25 digit unlock code will be listed for Europe NT. Copy that code into memory. Now run Mapsource, a pop up window will appear indicating that Europe is locked. Click on Skip. Then go to the Utilities menu, click on Manage Maps. Then click on the Unlock Regions tab. Now this is the fun part (not intuitive at all), click on Add, then in the pop up window paste your 25 digit unlock code here (that code is not the product key). Click OK, OK... and voila, your Europe NT map is now unlocked and you can proceed with the next step. Fun eh?

d) Now that your Europe map is unlocked - run MapInstall. More than likely you will see a very ugly map of Europe in a square. Just click on the upper left corner outside the square and drag down to the lower right corner to highlight all the region maps available. Make sure your GPS is plugged in your comptuer. Then click to send the maps to the GPS. Depending on your computer the map index build may take a long time or 5 minutes on a very fast quad core. Then the maps will transfer to your GPS, takes about 15 minutes.

Does all this sound intuitive? No. Not at all. Is it a pain in the rear, yes you betcha. Garmin really needs to improve the whole updating Nuvis. The software they are using is very very old - I used this many years ago to load maps onto an eMap where memory was outrageously expensive and extremely limited (before a trip I could only load the region I was travelling in). With cheap unlimited memory, this should be simpler now.

These maps are beautiful, have great detail, and will get you where you need to go in Europe. If only the install could be more intuitive.

Oh, now that you own this software, you'll probably also want to buy the NuMaps Lifetime for Europe and North America (this is lifetime of the device updates to the maps). If you already own NuMaps NA (Garmin nüMaps Lifetime North America Map Updates for detailed maps of the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico- write to Garmin, they might offer you a reduced price to upgrade that subscription to include Europe, they made a tasty offer to me.

July 8, 2009 Update - type nuvi tips and tricks into your favorite search engine. The first hit is a resource on how to better use your Nuvi. It's a fantastic site with hundreds of tips.

94 of 100 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Does what you'd expect, but not how you'd expect it, June 27, 2008

By 

D. Prorok - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Garmin City Navigator Europe NT for Detailed Maps of Eastern and Western Europe (DVD) (Software)

After updating firmware and the built-in US maps on my Garmin Nuvi, I expected this DVD-ROM to be a matter of firing up an install utility that connects to the nuvi and...ZAP...puts all the roads of Europe on it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that at all.

First off, the DVD-ROM is Windows only. Blah. I'll forgive that, but it's not even a particularly friendly Windows program. To use it, you have to go through some bologna on-line to use the code that comes in the packaging and then register on [...] and then get another code that activates a license for just one Garmin GPS. Annoying.

The next step, after surviving the copy protection and activation nonsense, is to fire up what appears to be the world's most pathetic PC mapping software, reminiscent of a Windows 3.1 application ported from DOS: few menu options and even fewer that are truly intuitive. Apparently what you need to do here is select the regions of Europe you want to load on your Garmin and then download them, bearing in mind that there is a finite amount of free space on your GPS and, apparently, not enough free space to hold all the roads of Europe...bummer.

Selecting the regions isn't what you'd expect, either. You can't just click on France and load all of its roads; there are a bunch of different regions of France, each of which must be clicked individually. You can't even just get Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport in one region. Central Paris is one region and CDG is in another. While you're at it, you probably should select a few more regions, like La Defense and all the adjacent regions to central Paris, because, heaven forbid, you decide to drive outside central Paris and not have the roads 10 miles outside of the city center loaded. Once you're done trying your best to guess every conceivable place you might drive in Europe (without choosing too many...remember, you only have so much space!) you can download all the maps to your GPS.

Once you actually *get* the maps on the GPS, it works pretty much how you'd expect. In Ireland, the thing paid for itself in spades, finding these little single-lane roads up the side of the mountain you'd swear was a driveway and not an honest road, but, it turns out, is the only way to get from here to there. The only operational oddity I could detect is that the already long boot time of my Nuvi appears to be even longer. Perhaps that's another reason not to load the whole continent.

For me, I love my Nuvi because I am away from home more days a year than I am home and it is handy to know I have maps to get me from anywhere to anywhere when I land in unfamiliar territory at 2 AM. I had hoped this map upgrade would give me that freedom for both North America and Europe, but, alas, that is not the case. I have North America and the subset of regions of Europe I thought I might be going to some time soon. I hope I don't get diverted to Frankfurt, though, without having preloaded the maps ahead of time.