Customer Reviews

Nextar X3-03 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The Nextar x3-03 is probably the best buy out there because it does include an a/c and d/c adapter and a cover along with free map upgrades when available - so they claim. The ac adapter is a benefit for outside sales people (real estate agents) so that you can program all your stops before hand. I recently purchase the tomtom and navignon and found them to be very useless especially the navignon because of the voice directions. It gave me about 5 steps when entering and leaving a ramp from the highway and I felt it would be really confusing if I did not know where I was. In addition to that, the navignon for some reason was trying to reroute me down streets I already knew they were dead ends. I return the tomtom and navignon back to staples and kept my Nextar.
The beauty of the nextar is in its simplicity. The prompts are at the right time without added conversation! It is very easy to select your your next location within seconds while at a traffic light - or rather I should say parked in a safe location. Entering address information was much easier than the others because of the simple predictive text which looks up streets as you are typing them in like Pac for pacific - the navigon would pull up wolfpack once you starting typing and that to me was no useful.
If you need a tool, the nextar is it, if you need a toy and graphics and more of what you don't need and less of what you really need, then I would certainly go back and purchase the tomtom and navigon. The sound and graphics are pretty cool.
The downside, I do not believe there is any quality control and be prepared to send a unit or two back. I originally purchased mine at Kmart which has a very good return policy, problem was, their inventory is light and they have been out of them for 6 weeks. So now I have purchased from Amazon because their exchage policy is just as easy.
Be aware that the battery does not last overnight as I believe the unit is always in standby mode even when you thought it was off.
Nextar is very up front about their problems and issues which you can read about in the support section [...]
I hope this helps anyone trying to make a decision. Best bet is to buy all 4 brands from a place you know they can be returned and try them all out for a day to see which one fits your needs.

Just picked one up today, had to drive an older downtown area, worked great. I had to drive under numerous overpasses, then down a street with very tall builidngs and never lost the aquisition signal. Kind of a key feature. Mine had a manufacture sticker of 12/07 so it was pretty much up to date. The POI is very cool, and very accurate. Sound level was good, I could here it in the background while the radio was at low volume. Very clearly spoken.

I was just amazed by the fast response. I have seen other units that were quite slow, not this one. For the price I paid, couln't beat it.
Was on sale at a local retail chain.

I opened the package, hooked it up to the wall outlet and started reading the manual.
As soon as the battery was charged fully, my preference you can turn it right on if you choose, I decided to see if my city had any POI's. I turned it on, input a few personal options and entered in my home address, I then located the POI's and found on in my home town that I had never been to, selected it as my destination, and off I went. It was great, turns were on the spot, the maps were awesome and the speed alert saved me from a possible speeding ticket!!!
You will not be disappointed!

I got this because it was inexspensive , but it keeps showing me error messages and I debate returning it. When it functions properly though, I like the way the maps look and they are always accurate. It's very easy to use, which is another reason I like it , and hesitate to retun it for something else. I hear some others have all kinds of bells and whistles but are more likly to get you lost or be inaccurate. .
J~

This review is going to take the form of a story. Bear with me.

My girlfriend's family celebrates Thanksgiving every year at the ancestral family home, an otherwise-abandoned house in the wilds of Colleton County, South Carolina. When I first went there, last year, I'd been told there was no street address at all -- apparently, the mailman just knew where to take everyone's mail. So last year, planning ahead, I'd saved the location into my older GPS (the cheapest TomTom available at the time I bought it).

This year, though, a friend was coming along, and he didn't know how to get there. So I gave him the old GPS and we decided to rely on my girlfriend's memory of the drive. For backup, we brought along this Nextar GPS, which she'd been given for Christmas the year before and had never used.

Unfortunately, due to some faulty directions from a family member, we missed our exit, only realizing that we were off-course almost an hour later when the friend who'd followed my other GPS called me up because he'd been there for fifteen minutes and was wondering where we were.

So at that point, we fell back on our backup plan: the Nextar x3-03. I was driving, so my girlfriend took the GPS and started trying to program it. Remember, we didn't have a direct street address, so the initial plan was just to get us close enough that my girlfriend's memories could take over. First thing we tried was plugging in a nearby small town, Canadys.

According to this GPS, Canadys doesn't exist. Maybe I shouldn't blame the GPS for that, since Canadys' only post office closed down in 1992, and apparently it's legally classified as a "community or populated place," not a "town" according to the census, but still, there are road signs to it and everything. It just doesn't exist in the world of Nextar.

So we tried filling in the next-nearest town, Smoaks. It did have Smoaks. Ok. So we plug in Smoaks and drive for an hour and we're getting close, we're running only about a half-hour past time for the blessing, we're thinking maybe this is recoverable, but we're still a fair distance away.

About then her family starts calling with suggestions. Most of them are pretty useless, since we don't know where we are to begin with, but her sister manages to track down the actual, historical street address of the house, off of Highway 61, and texts it to us. So my girlfriend plugs it in. Or rather, she tries to. It takes her twenty minutes, because the touchscreen is incredibly sensitive, and every time she hits the backspace, it enters a G, or a B, or some other random letter. When she finally gets "highway 61" plugged in, it only has street numbers up to ~2000, and the street address we have for the house is about five thousand more than that. SO that's a nix.

We know the house is near the intersection of Highway 61 and Interstate 95. We figure those are both pretty basic landmarks. My girlfriend spends the next half hour trying to plug that in. I experience that time mostly as a series of choked screams from the passenger's seat, things like "---MMIT I HIT S" or "WHERE THE ---- IS THE INTERSTATE." Turns out that the intersection of I-95 and Highway 61 doesn't exist in Nextar World. This is pretty surprising, since the interstate highway system is something you'd think a modern GPS would be able to find, but apparently that was an unreasonable expectation on my part.

Her sister eventually found someone else in the family who was there and a had a GPS, a good GPS that understood the concept of location, and pulled the exact latitude and longitude of the house off that one, then text-messaged it to us. Problem: the Nextar x3-03 doesn't appear to have any way to enter a pair of latitude/longitude coordinates. The first GPS I ever owned, a 1998 Magellan that didn't even have any roadmaps in it, just an *arrow* that swiveled to point at your destination, could comprehend latitude and longitude. That was the only thing it *did* understand. If it hadn't been one of the five electronic devices in the world that got burned out by the Y2K bug, it would have been a better guide in our situation than this Nextar, and gotten us there sooner.

Eventually, my girlfriend breaks down crying because she realizes that she's going to miss dinner with her family at Thanksgiving, so I pull over, take the GPS, and try just plugging in Highway 61 intersecting with Highway 61, in the hope that it'll at least get us to the road that way. We do that. We drive for a half hour and when we finally hit Highway 61, we realize it's taken us halfway back down to Charleston, directly away from where we needed to be.

We finally get there, over two hours late, only to find that my friend had been sitting in his car by the side of the road the whole time because he didn't want to introduce himself & be a complete stranger. So we all three missed Thanksgiving dinner. We made up for it by spending the next few hours shooting off her father's black-powder cannon, and we did all get a hearty serving of the leftovers, but still. When we eventually made it back to civilization, my girlfriend set her facebook status to "My GPS is useless. It can neither be eaten nor burned for warmth."

Some of the fault for this whole fiasco rests on us, of course -- we could've gotten better directions before we left, etc. It may be that the Nextar x3-03 has all the features above, and if we'd, say, figured out a hidden menu option that allowed the entry of latitude/longitude coordinates, it would've have gotten us there on time.

But if those features exist, we couldn't find them, and that's a problem. You don't need a GPS when you're perfectly prepared and have directions and are heading somewhere that's easy to find -- you need a GPS when you're lost, late, and trying to find somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And when we were lost and late for Thanksgiving dinner, this thing couldn't even find the intersection of a major state highway and Interstate 95.

It ruined Thanksgiving, and made my girlfriend cry.

I bought this unit at a black Friday sale for $79.99. Before I did I read reviews on it and most said it was great for the price. I will have to agree. First of all its the lowest price gps I've ever seen. I used to work at RadioShack a few months ago and worked there for over a year so I have tested a bunch of gps units. This one is just as accurate as any gps out there. It also has text to speech which is great becuase when you come to a bunch of roads and your not sure which one to take this says the actual road name instead of just turn here. Like in one of the reviews earlier this is not a flashy gps. You can't change the voices to famous people and you can only do so much with the display but the features you need are there.

Pros -
1. Predictive text when typing in the city name or road name makes for quick routing.
2. There are 4 different modes to set your route, such as quickest, shortest distance and so on. You can also modify them to avoid tolls and so on.
3. Text to speech is awesome.
4. Extra Features such as an mp3 player if you aren't using it for directions.
5. It comes with everything you would ever need for a gps. It comes with a case, mounting for the window or dash, Home and Car Charger, Software for map upgrades on the SD card, and really good instruction manuals.
6. The touch screen is very accurate and responsive.

Cons-
1. The Battery life isn't the greatest. But no gps is yet. If you set the screen to the dimmest possible it lasts around 2 to 2.5 hours if you leave the brightness all the way up it it will last 1 to 1.5 hours.
2. No bluetooth but what do you expect for the price. To be honest unless you have a phone that can send directions to the gps who needs bluetooth anyway.
3. There aren't as many POI's as other gps units out there. It only has 1.5 million when others have 6 million.

Overall the Cons seem to be things that aren't a necessity when having a gps. So if you don't care about the cons I listed this is a great unit. When I am buying a gps I care about map accuracy and the text to speech thing is pretty nice and this gps has those. Also the map updates are supposed to be free when they come out. Unlike any other gps unit.

Well, I just got mine yesterday, it's actually the x3-08, but I couldn't find here. I'm not sure how it differs from this one, but WE love it. I actually bought two, one for me and one for my husband. We've never had any others but it gets the job done and has the points of interest in our area. We have yet to try it out of town, but so far so good.

I received this GPS for Mother's Day in May. LOVED it!! The sound was good and the picture and turn by turn was GREAT. Then in June I was transporting the school basketball team (4 hours away) and tried to enter where we were going. The GPS wouldn't work. I had to go and hoped that it would start working as we drove along. Luckly it did start working. Then in July the night before we left on vacation the GPS did the same thing as it did in June. I hoped while driving it would start working like it did before but sad to say it didn't. When we returned home I pulled the info out of the box to call to see about getting a new one. I was told that I shouldn't have let the battery run down and now I needed to recharge the battery for 9 hours then see if the item would work. It didn't. I called and was then told that I would be charged $25.00 to have a new one sent to me after I paid to have the unit that I had returned to them. I reminded them that I have the receipt for May and had it less then 90 days before having problems. The representive then told me they would waive the $25.00 fee but I would have to pay to return it. I have yet to receive a new unit. I received a email stating that they received my unit and when I call about it they state it will be shipped shortly. It is now October.

I purchased the Nextar x3 from another site (it currently does not offer it) The product took 10 minutes to find a signal and then got stuck on the last destination. It is locked up and won't do anything. I sent it back. My first gps was a Tom Tom. Was very happy with it but it was stolen. I have since purchased a Garmin Nuvi based on reviews and love it. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

This is my first GPS unit. I am not a gadget guy. I bought this unit for a long trip (1600 miles) through lots of unfamiliar road systems. Set up was very easy. Everything worked right out of the box. The first trip I worked with was to the next city over. It gave me options of how to enter my destination, I chose and it said start driving. My wife was with me and said she needed to stop at a store on the way which I had not planned for. The GPS altered our rout to account for a different starting place and still got us to our destination. As we live in a major metro area, there are many different ways to get where you want to go. As we came to major roads the GPS told us to stay left of the exit and look for signs to proceed. Very handy to know which lane to be in if you are unfamiliar with the city. We use it now even for places we go to often and it has a favorite option which lists the address of favorite destinations stored so you do not have to re-enter them. Overall a great unit with good solid features easy to set up and use. The only slight flaw was the sound could be louder. I have not used the mp3 player yet but it does have a headphone attachment which should solve the sound problem.