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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great GPS Accessory, September 22, 2002
Not only do I go geocaching (..., to learn more), but I also use my GPS in the car with me basically all the time; especially on long road trips. I do think that my GPS does have a good battery life by itself, considering that many other electronic devices like this tend to go through batteries like there's no tomorrow. But, the batteries do get worn down if you leave the GPS on for quite a while, like when you're driving. Hence, that's why I bought this product.First of all, I decided to get this adapter with both the cigarette lighter plug-in and the computer adapter because I not only wanted to plug the GPS into my car, but I also wanted to download waypoints from the internet to store onto the GPS. Like I said, I go geocaching, and before I had this adapter, I had to manually enter in all of the coordinates to each of the waypoints. It can be done, but it does take up a lot of time. Instead, now I can just plug this adapter into my computer, along with the GPS, and download all of the coordinates to their own waypoints onto the GPS. I also saved all of my waypoints that I had already stored onto my computer, as a back-up measure. In case they ever get deleted off the GPS, for some reason. In summary, the computer adapter is definitely a time saver if you find yourself manually entering waypoints. Secondly, I used the cigarette adapter plug-in during my summer vacation. I was on the road for 1,000 + miles, with my GPS plugged in the whole time. The great thing is, I didn't go through any batteries the entire trip! Sure, they did drain a bit because I used the GPS outside of the car, but I'm sure I would have been going through new batteries every day without the adapter. One more thing that I liked is that the GPS does not turn off when you turn your vehicle off. If you have batteries installed in the GPS, it will automatically power off of them when you turn off your car engine. It does this flawlessly, too. All in all, if I could, I probably would give this product 4.5 stars. My major gripe with this produce is that Garmin does not provide USB support. My computer only has one serial port, and I already had another device plugged into it. So I have to swap them whenever I want to use this. USB would probably transfer the data between the computer and GPS faster. Also, the price of this product is a little steep, as well; I don't think Garmin would hurt that much to lower their MSRP a little bit.
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