Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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233 of 237 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Unit For its Price Range, August 25, 2005
I received this unit yesterday and have played with it for a few hours. Prior to this unit I have used a Magellan Sportrack for Geocaching and for my car I have used my Dell Axim pocket PC with Ostia mapping software which is terrible, and more recently I have been using Microsoft Streets and Trips 2005 on my laptop. Streets and Trips is excellent however it does not have voice prompts for turn-by-turn directions and viewing a laptop while you are trying to drive can be tough.
This Garmin I3 has excellent routing capability, very similar to MS Streets and Trips and has plenty of points of interests( POI). The screen is small but it is readable in both daylight and night. The suction mount holds very well on the windshield.
The voice prompts are loud and clear.
There is not much detail shown on the screen because of it's size, such as some street names and no POI's. The map will zoom in more as you are nearing your turn and the voice prompt's will tell you you need to turn in .5 to .3 miles and 400 to 500 ft before the turn.
On the display is also shown the distance to your next turn and an estimated arrival time to your destination. The unit will automatically re-route if you take a wrong turn.
Satellite acquisition time is pretty quick, and the manual states that you should keep batteries in it so that it will find satellites faster. The unit also comes with a cigarette lighter adapter. I do not think that the unit will recharge batteries though, and the battery level indicator is located on the "where to" screen only.
The only controls are a scroll wheel that doubles as a button and a back button and a power button. It is fairly simple to use and easy to figure out.
The included 128mb transflash card is more than adequate for my needs, I fit all of NJ, NY and PA and still had plenty of room.
You can store places in your favorites by adding them in your address screen, or you can store your current position simply by pressing and holding the scroll wheel button in.
Some cons to this unit is that it does not show the total distance of your trips, it just shows distance to the next turn.
If you want to add a stop on your destination it only allows 1 via point, after you visit that point you have to add your next via point. As I mentioned before there isn't too much detail on the screen but it does show you where you need to go.
I would highly recommend this unit above a pocket pc navigation, at least with Ostia software anyway.
For the price of this unit you really can't complain about the cons. This is a simple GPS unit that does what it is supposed to do, get you from point A to point B.
********update 6/15/06***********
Nearly a year and I still love this thing - navigation works great. Now that I am an experienced user I want a fancier touch screen, the scroll wheel is a pain in the neck. I also want a unit that you can put in multi-routes, like if you want to go to garage sales you can put in all the addresses and let the unit decide the best route. However, I will keep this unit longer before I thrown down a few hundred more for an advanced model.
I still haven't found the need to get a larger memory card, I've driven in New Jersey, New York state, Pennsylvania and Washington DC, and Connecticut.
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153 of 158 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Updated review - very good with some quirks, October 22, 2005
I have to edit this review, having used the product a bit more. I bought this having never owned a GPS before and still can't compare it to others, but can give a good first-time-owner's perspective.
- Size. You can throw this GPS into a carryon on a flight and use it in a rental car when you arrive. It's totally unobtrusive, you can put it up next to the rear-view-mirror and it blocks none of your view. You can hide it in a car compartment when you're not in a safe location. It does not have a touchscreen - this isn't really a big problem, but this and the size make it slower to enter addresses. It's a tradeoff, but I believe I prefer the size of this unit.
- Satellite tracking. Sometimes it'll take up to 30 seconds or so to acquire satellites when you power on. That's not too bad, but a little annoying. A bigger problem is that occasionally tracking seems to be lost. The GPS seems to think the car is pointed diagonally, or the map stops updating. Had these problems both in downtown Boston and coming from Virginia into DC on the GW Bridge. WAAS seems useless, by the way.
- Route recalculation. Pretty quick - usually happens in < 10 s when you miss a turn. Recalculations are pretty good - and the whole route is recalculated, not a path to the previous route. Once in a while it thinks you're off your route when you're not at all - it has the route coordinates wrong. It readjusts quickly.
- Routing/directions. Generally I think the calculated directions are very good. The program takes you on intelligent routes that are not always the absolute fastest but are pretty close. They could get annoying if you're living near an area in which they're inefficient or just wrong. In Harrisburg, PA it told me repeatedly to turn left on an expressway/bridge that you can't turn left on. If I were living close by (as I once was) this would be enough to return the unit. However, around my area they're fine.
- Prompts/info: I suspect Garmin is getting all its routing info including prompts from Navteq, so these are really Navteq problems common to many GPS devices. Often neither the voice prompt or the screen gives adequate info on which lane you should be in or which particular exit/street you should be taking. This is the most frustrating problem with this unit. When you're downtown, or going past a complicated set of highway entrances and exits, the combination of the voice prompt ("Bear right in 0.5 miles" - there are no voiced road names), the screen text ("Right on Dobbs Highway"), and the map is inadequate to determine where you should be turning. I've heard the StreetPilot i5 has a somewhat better Navteq route info system than this unit does.
Some very, very common situations:
- Road curves right and also exits both left and right. You're told to "Bear right". Which is it, follow the road or exit to the right?
- Two exits both to the right for the same highway, one North and the other South. You're told to "Turn right in 0.5 miles". The screen says "Right on Dobbs Highway". Which is it, exit North or exit South?
- Map Storage: Loading the software and maps was a bit buggy and slow for me the first time. If you intend to bring this on long trips or on air travel it might make sense to pay the extra money for the i5, which has maps preloaded - otherwise you have to load new maps for where you're going.
- Points of interest. Some of the points of interest are out of date or just inaccurate. This seems to be a common problem with GPS's, but it's really aggravating to drive someplace and find it doesn't exist, or that the GPS hasn't provided good enough directions to locate it.
Also, I have no idea if any competing product offers this, but if I'm driving on a route and I want to find a gas station, I obviously would prefer one that is ahead of me along my route. I probably don't want one that is behind me, and one that's off to the side somewhere isn't particularly convenient. But all I get is "Shell 3.5 miles". Could be behind me, ahead of me, anywhere. As far as I know that's 3.5 miles as the crow flies, too. It could be 3.5 miles away but across a river for which there's no bridge close by. This is a commonly used feature that gets annoying - you have to look at where each POI is in relation to your route rather than just picking the first one.
All in all I'm still quite happy with it. I certainly wouldn't pay double the price for a slightly improved one! The advantage at this price is that you can trade it out when newer technology comes out. Can't do that easily with a $2500 in-dash manufacturer nav system.
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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Garmin I3 initial experience, November 28, 2005
Garmin StreetPilot I3
Software Version 2.70 (Updated from 2.30)
Audio Version 2.00
General Info:
I purchased the Garmin I3 from Amazon.com for $323.00. I have used it to navigate around a small town and it has worked almost perfectly. I have an Astro van and use one of the coffec cup holders to hold the I3. The cup holder is located about half way down the front console and the Garmin seems to pick up the GPS signals with no problem. I have also taken three 2 ½ hour trips out-of-town and the navigation has been excellent. The audio is excellent and can easily be heard over wind and road noise. I used the garmin Webupdater [...] to update my unit from Version 2.30 to 2.70. The update is completely automatic and takes about 10 - 15 minutes to download and install the updated operating system software.
The I3 has a simulation mode. You can simulate a trip by going to the System->GPS Mode and turning off the GPS. Return to the map mode and the unit will then simulate the trip. Makes for a useful teaching tool or a demo for your friends.
The bad:
I have had only two instances of the unit providing incorrect information. One was at my local post office. The unit directed me to turn left (incorrectly) on a one-way street and did not "know" about a new (about 2 years) off ramp on Interstate 15.
The Via Points (Waypoints) are pretty much useless and you can only have one waypoint active at a time. I have not been able to find any instructions for setting them up in the on-line manuals or anywhere else
The one bug I have found is that the unit will emit two incorrect turn instructions "go left, then go left" when it is first turned on and just after it finds the satellites.
Wish list
The screen is small but useable. If Garmin would update the operating software so that the unit issued statements like "turn right on main street " instead of "turn right in .1 miles" there would be little or no need to look at the screen at all. The more expensive StreetPilot Garmin units have this feature now.
The provided suction cup mount will only work to a degree on windows. You can only use the mount in other places by first PERMANENTLY applying a round mount to your console. I chose not to do this so I don't know if this works. There should be a better solution.
The description of the updates on the Garmin site is inadequate. They do not give a user any clue about what is in the update. I can detect no difference in the operation of the unit after the updates. It would be nice if Garmin would supply some info about the content of the updates.
Despite the nit picks, I am very happy with the Garmin I3 and highly recommend it.
Update:
I have used my Garmin I3 for several more trips and I am delighted with its performance. Ironically it works well every where except for my home town. In my home town , two major chain stores (Wal Mart and Staples) are mis-located to the north of town and one of two Albertsons is not listed at all. I used the GPS twice for yard sales and all the residential addresses were correct. All in all the unit has performed exceptionally well. The audio directions have been superb.
Just for info, you can get a pretty good picture of which maps are loaded by zooming all the way out (this works best if you turn off the GPS navigation first. ) In my case I had first loaded California and Texas, then had to cut back to Southern California and Northern Texas to make room for Arizona and New Mexico. The map on my unit shows full coverage for California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. Actually I have only partial coverage of Texas and California. I sent a mail message to Garmin and asked them how much memory I would need to load all the States in the U.S. Their reply was 2GB. At this time MicroSD cards only have a maximum of 512MB, so we will have to wait a while to get full coverage.
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