Garmin nüvi 5000 5.2-Inch Portable GPS Navigator Review

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(More customer reviews)First, I would like to say that I really like my Garmin nuvi 5000. It is the first GPS unit I have ever owned. It is very easy to use and the large screen is very visible in all light levels. However, there are three areas where I feel the unit falls short. First, it needs a rechargeable internal battery that would allow it to be used disconnected from the automobile, even if only for a short period of time. The battery life would be extendable by having a way to switch off the screen and allowing the unit continue to operate. Second, the unit needs a better manual that goes more detail about the working of the unit. For example, it tells you how to add favorites locations to your unit's memory, but it does not tell you how many locations you can have, nor does it tell you if an SD card will add space for more. The third and biggest problem with this unit is the lack of a good internal antenna. My experience has shown that the unit is not very good at acquiring satellites as it is designed. I have experienced the following problems using the unit mounted on the beanbag holder (Garmin's Portable Friction Dashboard Mount) on my car's dashboard: When parked in my driveway with a clear overhead view, it can take more then 2-3 minutes to acquire a good signal lock; Pulling out of my garage and driving down suburban roads at less then 40 miles per hour, it has taken more than 10 minutes to get a good lock on the satellites; Once when driving down an Interstate highway with a wide open sky view, the unit lost signal and took several minutes to re-acquire the satellites; and at other times it has showed it poor design of the internal antenna. To try to solve this problem, I purchased the external Garmin antenna. This antenna is designed with a magnet to attache to the car roof and plug into the back of the unit. This works very well and solves the problem of satellite acquisition, but makes for a messy dash. However, I found that if the antenna is just placed horizontally on the dash behind the unit it works just as well. This brought me to conclude that the unit should be designed with an attached flip up antenna, as come commercial unites have, to improve satellite acquisition. I gave it four stars, because with the added antenna, the unit works great and I would not want to give it up.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Garmin nüvi 5000 5.2-Inch Portable GPS Navigator

This super-sized navigator combines a big 5.2-inch display with the convenience and flexibility of a portable device and fits a full array of features into a slim, easy to carry package that's just .8 inches thick. The nuvi 5000 was designed for RV and truck drivers, whose distant windshields can make a small screen hard to see and even harder to reach. In addition to its large, bright display, its features include preloaded maps for all of North America, a photo viewer and MP3 player, and an FM transmitter that lets you hear turn-by-turn voice navigation prompts, MP3s, and audio books through your vehicle's stereo. It's also compatible with FM traffic alerts or MSN Direct content (receiver and subscription required). It comes with Garmin Lock (an anti-theft feature) and configurable vehicle icons that let you select car-shaped graphics to show your location on the map. Optional plug-in SD cards let you add additional features to enhance your travel experience including language translation and detailed travel guides
Which nuvi is Best for You?: Click here to see a quick, simple comparison of features for all Garmin nuvi GPS navigators



See More Clearly, the display is the main differentiator of the nuvi 5000. With nuvi 5000's large, clear display, you won\'t miss a thing. View map detail, driving directions, photos, play games and more in bright, brilliant color. Its sunlight-readable, 5.2-inch display is easy to read and gives you an extended view of your surroundings. nuvi 5000 also includes a composite video input so you can connect it to a rear-view camera for backing up safely.

Multi-Destination Routing This lets you enter several spots into the device (day care - supermarket-cleaners - office - day care, for example) and it will plot the fastest route. And once you've found the best router, the "Route Planning" feature lets you save up to 10 different routes, Garmin touts the feature for providing, "the most efficient route for errands, deliveries and sales calls." The feature also makes this an instant essential accessory for anyone who shops garage sales (you know what we're talking about). A trip log provides an electronic bread crumb trail of up to 10,000 points, so you can see where you've been on the map.

Where Am I? Garmin's "Where Am I?" feature is a useful safety feature on all nuvis, but voice recognition makes it even better.

On any nuvi (including this one), you can just tap "Where Am I?" to find the closest hospitals, police stations, fuel stations, nearest address and intersection. Also see your exact latitude and longitude coordinates. With the 800s, all you have to do is say "Where am I?" to get the info.
First Rate Map Data Comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded City Navigator NT street maps, including a hefty POI database with hotels, restaurants, fuel, ATMs and more. Simply touch the color screen to enter a destination, and nuvi takes you there with 2D or 3D maps and turn-by-turn voice directions. Garmin gets its map data from NAVTEQ, a world leader in premium-quality mapping.
In addition, nuvi accepts custom points of interest (POIs), such as school zones and safety cameras and lets you set proximity alerts to warn you of upcoming POIs
Important note about map updates: Due to our high volume of sales, almost every Garmin portable GPS navigator sold by Amazon.com will come with the most recent map version. If you ever do need a map update, you can purchase one from Amazon.com at our Garmin Store. Garmin Lock Garmin's patent pending theft prevention system that disables the unit from performing any functions until the user types in a specific 4-digit PIN or takes the unit to a predetermined secure location
Easy To Use Interface Garmin's interface is a key to their success and one of the things that makes their devices such a pleasure to use. Simple controls and sub-screens make it easy to enter or search for destinations and get data about your trip.
Beyond Navigation
Navigation is just the beginning. The nuvi features travel tools including JPEG picture viewer, MP3 player, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, calculator and more. It also comes with Garmin Lock, an anti-theft feature, and configurable vehicle icons that let you select car-shaped graphics to show your location on the map.

This device is compatible with optional content plug-ins available via SDcard, such as the Garmin Travel Guides and Garmin SaversGuide provide detailed data for attractions and information on nearby merchants offering discounts, so you can customize nuvi for your travel needs

Garmin has also added the ability for customers to add custom points of interest (POI\'s) from third parties such as school zones and safety cameras.
Trick Your GPS Ride
All Garmin nuvis support configurable vehicle icons. These fun, customized car-shaped icons come in a variety of colors to add a personal touch to your vehicle's position on the map.

With this GPS system on board you'll be prepared to steer clear of traffic with the integrated FM TMC traffic receiver. The nuvi 770 is designed to receive alerts about traffic tie-ups and road construction that might lie ahead on your route. All you have to do is simply touch the screen to view traffic details and you'll be ready to detour around any problem area. And if you end up missing a turn, or you're forced into a detour that is not relayed through the traffic receiver, the nuvi's sophisticated automatic routing will get you back on track in no time.



What's in the Box nuvi 5000, Preloaded City Navigator NT for North America, Vehicle suction cup mount, Vehicle power cable, Dashboard disc, USB cable, Quick start manual

Notes

The FM transmitter feature is only available in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
Like most USB Mass Storage Devices, the nuvi is not compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me.


Which nuvi is Best for You? Note: All nuvis come with detailed NAVTEQ maps containing more than 6 million pre-loaded point of interest locations.
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Garmin nüvi 670 4.3-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this to replace a Tomtom Navigator 5 system running on a Dell x51v with the external Tomtom Bluetooth receiver. The major issues with that were a terrible lack of POIs, terrible time and distance predictions, poor routing, no control of the map view and the receiver shutting off despite being on external power.
First thing I noticed on opening the box is that the mains charger comes with adapters for all the countries I regularly visit, so I clicked the US two pin adapter in place, plugged it in then plugged the lead into the 670. It came on immediately and said it was loading maps. A few seconds later it showed a map. It was already locked on! That's a huge advance from the old days when it took at least 4 minutes for my GPSIII+ to find the satellites. I am in the middle of the top floor of a large open plan building, the position shown was accurate.
Without looking at the manual I got rid of the touch beep, bound it to my bluetooth phone, set the timezone and voice and set it up to navigate to a restaurant for lunch. All in under 15 minutes with time out for work.
In the car I mounted the unit to the windshield and plugged in the power conenction, it immediately lit up green to show it was connected to the traffic system. I was expecting to have to register and sign up for a service agreement, instead it came up and showed it was already enabled with 3 months to run. A few minutes later I looked at the traffic detail map and saw it already showed the local problem areas. Very cool.
Apparently the 2.60+ firmware handles 4Gb SD cards so I ordered one and look forward to trying the MP3 player. (I have used three different 4Gb cards since I wrote this and they all work perfectly.)
I tested the POI list by looking for gas stations and particular stores in the area, it had everything I knew of and more, so I am very hopeful at this stage.
I'm looking forward to trying the hands free too, all we did so far is dial another cell phone in the car and laugh about the echo we got. Sound quality and volume seemed good. I'm going for a 1500 mile road trip to Utah this weekend, so I'll update after that.
1685 miles later...
Garmin certainly has accurate maps for CA, NV and UT, they seemed very up to date. The option to "avoid dirt roads" was especially welcome and saved me some nasty miles that the direct route would have taken on unpaved roads. Routing was mostly good, but could do with some more skepticism on the choice of rural state roads. I was happy to take route 88 into the Sierras from the bay area because I was on a road trip, but I80 is probably 50% faster.
The one significant bug is a holdover from previous Garmin products like the GPS V, it is also an issue it shares with Tomtom. While heading down an interstate, let's take I880 from Oakland to Fremont as an example, with many miles of straight ahead to go, the 670 will direct you off at a ramp, it likes to take the I238 ramp towards Livermore, and then immediately back on. This is amusing to a local, but it could be very confusing to a visitor. It did the same to me in 395 south through Reno last night, that did confuse me. This is a bug that should have been eradicated years ago.
Another issue with the GPS V is still present in the 670. When recalculating the map display is suspended, so right when you need to see what's going on you have a useless map. When routing resumes it gives the verbal instructions before repainting the map. Not good. In contrast the Tomtom always recalculates silently and just flashes up the new route. The Tomtom never leaves you with a dead screen. I don't like to be told every time the route is recalculated, when I go the wrong way, for whatever reason, there's no brownie points to be gained telling me off. At the very least there should be the option to disable this 'feature'.
POI selection is absolutely outstanding, at least compared to other things I have used. It makes the Tomtom implementation look like amateur night. You can select the POI by type, gas stations, shops and restaurants are my favorites, then either go straight to the list of hit SPELL and type in part of the name. It will match on any part of the name, so you can include partial names, even partial words, and it will still show the matches. Once you have your list you can select by address, direction and distance, or see the POI on a map. The direction changes from compass direction when stationary to relative direction when moving, so you don't have to waste your time looking at gas stations you passed twenty miles ago.
I did have one POI which can obviously never have been true, the Shell station near Lohi, UT has obviously always been a house. But mostly the POIs are very accurate.
It is disappointing that you can no longer select different on-screen data, I liked that with the old units and miss it. That's a big step backwards. I want to know time-to-next, time-to-go, course, altitude and other things that used to be offered.
There is a weird issue with map detail and zoom level, small roads appear and disappear as you zoom in and out. Let's be clear, a small road that is visible on a small scale (big area) disappears as you zoom in and then only reappears at some of the highest scales (most detailed) when you can't see any context, or even if it's actually the same road.
In general though, the automatic map scaling is very good, the 3-D view shifts to a track up view as it zooms out, this addresses my major gripe with Tomtom in that it allows you to keep your route in context and see how you are getting on in the big picture. As the view zooms in it adds a lot of street detail, much much better than Tomtom.
The time to destination predictions remain excellent. Outstanding. It was within minutes on the driving time over a distance of hundreds of miles on each occasion. Tomtom is often pessimistic by 50%, totally inadequate for planning purposes.
Is it worth it? Is it as good as it should be? For me, no and no. For $850 I can get a decent laptop, that's a lot more hardware, so that's not where the money went. They are still not addressing their software issues, they have faulty algorithms that have been unmodified for years and inherited from old products. As a software engineer I am disappointed but not surprised. Near work it will still sometimes tell me to take three right turns instead of an entirely legal left.
But it is very good. Garmin's mechanical people have done a great job, this is obviously a class device. But the software and systems people aren't as good.
Overall? If I could edit the rating I'd drop at a point or two now. But I still haven't seen better. At these prices it's not like there are many people who are willing to try them all.
Contrasting my own companies attitude to software errors (we are one of the biggest suppliers in the cell phone, commercial radio, wireless networking and many other fields), we would not allow even a mildly irritating bug to remain in one of our products for years. So I am wondering if I should return this on principal. I'll try support first, in the past that didn't achieve much.
8,000 miles later
Yes, I do a lot of miles.
Lasting impressions: I almost always have the voice prompt switched off, the guidance is repeated too often on high speed roads and I hate to hear it continuously telling me that it is recalculating when I don't agree with the way it told me to go.
There have been too many instances of ridiculous routing, you need to zoom out and see of the route looks sensible. Most do. A good example of a bad one was in Yellowstone National Park, I was in Canyon Village and wanted to return to my hotel in West Yellowstone, about a 35 mile trip fairly well due west. The first part went OK but then I was directed north 60 miles on US89, 30 miles west on I90 then 60 miles south on US191. I ignored the advice and the continuous u-turn instructions and recalculation. As I arrived at the Wyoming/Montana border, about three miles down a straight road from my hotel, the Nuvi crashed. Screen controls didn't work. When I swiched it off and on again it discovered there was a three mile route to the hotel instead of the previous 170+ mile suggestion. Strange.
The traffic information has been a mixed blessing too. As traffic builds in the morning and evening rush hours it seems to be added in realtime, but it doesn't seem to be purged out when it is no longer present. So if I go in to work late at 10am the roads are running at the speed limit but the traffic information on the Nuvi still says they are at a crawl. On Friday night I went to dinner after work, when I left at 11pm the roads were quiet and most people were doing 15mph over the limit, but the Nuvi told me that I880 was jammed solid with a 30 minute delay for the next few miles. That had probably been true six hours earlier, but not in the last four. This isn't a fault with the unit, it's a fault with the traffic service, when switched on the unit gave the correct route. Bad traffic information also gives unreasonably pessimistic ETA estimates.
Would I buy it knowing what I do now? Still yes. I still think Garmin are the best of the current offerings, they just need to fix a few things and beat up their traffic information provider.
Does it work with SDHC Cards? Yes it does. I have tried the Transcend 4Gb card, which I use for music and audio books, and a SanDisk 4Gb card which came straight out of my Canon SD1000 and in to the Nuvi. A couple of seconds later it was showing a slide show of the pictures I took recently, so it can handle 2Mb jpeg files too.
Long term traffic issues:...Read more›

Click Here to see more reviews about: Garmin nüvi 670 4.3-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator

Now you can go from North America to Europe without loading any moremaps with the Garmin's transatlantic nuvi 670 Personal Travel Assistant. This pocket-sized personal travel assistant comes with built-in street maps for both continents, making traveling abroad as easy as getting off the plane. The nuvi 670 is loaded with convenience features such as a travel kit and hands-free calling, on top of which it provides you with even more maps and an integrated traffic receiver.
Despite being loaded with features, the nuvi 670 still allows you to navigate with ease. This unit comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded NavTeq City Navigator NT street maps for both North America and Europe, and includes a hefty points of interest (POIs) database with hotels, restaurants, fuel stops, ATMs and more. Simply touch the super-bright, sunlight-readable color screen to enter a destination, and the 670 takes you there with either 2D or 3D maps and turn-by-turn voice directions. This navigator voice even announces the name of exits and streets so you never have to take your eyes off the road, and can concentrate on your driving to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. In addition, the 670 accepts custom points of interest (POIs), such as school zones and safety cameras, and lets you set proximity alerts to warn you of upcoming POIs that require your special consideration such as speed zones and safety cameras.

Speaking of keeping you safe, the nuvi 670 lets you make hands-free calls so you can talk freely during your worry-free driving. By integrating Bluetooth wireless technology with a built-in microphone and speaker, you can pair your nuvi with any compatible Bluetooth phone and talk hands-free while staying focused on the road. You no longer have to fumble with your phone's handset to answer a call or dial a number, just tap the 670's screen and you're instantly connected. And with 1-touch dialing for your POIs, you can quickly and conveniently call ahead to make reservations or get needed information.

You can also avoid tie-ups and steer clear of traffic with the nuvi 670's integrated FM TMC traffic receiver. This unit allows you to receive alerts about road construction and traffic problems that lie ahead on your route. Simply touch the nuvi's screen to view traffic details or change your route so you can detour around the problem area. All of which can be customized with configurable vehicle icons that let you choose individual car-shaped icons in a variety of colors that show your position on the map. As an added benefit, the nuvi 670 has an FM transmitter as well, which allows you to hear its voice prompts, or your music or audio books through your car's stereo for a fuller, richer sound.

In additional to all this functionality, the nuvi 670 includes many must-have entertainment and travel tools such as an MP3 player, an audio book player (subscription to Audible.com required), and a JPEG picture viewer so you can take your favorite music and pictures with you wherever you go. This unit also features a world travel clock with time zones, a currency converter, a measurement converter, and a calculator so that wherever you travel it will be easy to know what you are getting and keep track of your costs. The MP3 player lets you browse music by artist, album, and/or song, while the optional audio books may be purchased from Audible.com which features over 70,000 hours of audio programs. What's more, the nuvi 670 allows further customization via optional software such as travel guide, savings programs and language translation on plug-and-play SD cards for all your travel needs.

The Garmin nuvi 670 comes with a built-in, high-sensitivity, WAAS-enabled GPS receiver, and lets you view and operate it via its bright, LCD TFT touch-screen, wide-screen display that measures 4.3 inches (diagonal) and has a resolution of 480 x 272 pixels with 64,000 colors and a white backlight. As a whole, the nuvi 670 measures 4.9 x 2.9 x 0.9 inches (W x H x D), and weighs only 6.2 ounces for easy portability. This unit provides you with from three to seven hours of battery life (depending on use) via its rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and comes with Garmin Lock, which is an anti-theft feature to protect your investment. While you can add software via the SD card slot, the Garmin nuvi 670 also lets you interface via high-speed USB for loading data, though users should note that, like most USB mass storage devices, this unit is not compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me.



First Rate Map Data The nuvi 670 comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded City Navigator NT street maps, including a hefty POI database with hotels, restaurants, fuel, ATMs and more. Simply touch the color screen to enter a destination, and nuvi takes you there with 2D or 3D maps and turn-by-turn voice directions. Garmin gets its map data from NAVTEQ, a world leader in premium-quality mapping.

In addition, the nuvi 260W accepts custom points of interest (POIs), such as school zones and safety cameras and lets you set proximity alerts to warn you of upcoming POIs

Important note about map updates: Due to our high volume of sales, almost every Garmin portable GPS navigator sold by Amazon.com will come with the most recent map version. If you ever do need a map update, you can purchase one from Amazon.com at our Garmin Store.

What's in the Box Garmin nuvi 670, City Navigator NT maps for North America and Europe (preloaded, full coverage), FM traffic receiver and transmitter, vehicle suction cup mount, AC charger, vehicle power cable, dashboard disk, USB cable, leather carrying case, quick reference guide, and owner's manual.


Which nuvi is Best for You?Note: All nuvis come with detailed NAVTEQ maps containing more than 6 million pre-loaded point of interest locations.
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