Satellite navigation systems

[karen2205]

I think I posted about this ages ago, but technology moves on sufficiently quickly that I'm going to post again.

My mum wants a Sat Nav system for Christmas and we don't know what to look for in one. Is buying the cheapest available OK, or is this an area where you still have to go for the original 'Tom Tom' in order to get reasonable quality? [I'm not going for the Binatone one at £80 - I had a phone from them that worked for a couple of years before breaking].

Help.

Comments

[brrm.livejournal.com]

As a data point, I've had a Tomtom for a few years now, and am very happy with it. When I bought mine, they were the iPod of Satnavs - they didn't have all the features of other units, but what they did have worked perfectly, and the interface was very slick. Tomtom has since gained features like speed camera positions, so I think the feature difference may be less of an issue now.

[brrm.livejournal.com]

Don't forget to tell her not to believe it when it tells her to drive into a ditch, though ;-)

[clare-s.livejournal.com]

Tomtom is very good however, my Dad has the RAC one which was around £100. it does all he wants and is fine.

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

For working out where you are, they are all fairly good - the one feature that impresses me is Trafficmaster's call centre where when they've directed you down a narrow lane that no sane person would travel down you can contact them and yell at them and they'll remove it from the list of recommended routes. (The ability to phone them up after your car's been nicked and get them to turn on the GPS monitoring (for a fee) and relay it real time to the police is another fun one).

In terms of networks, they all are pretty much alike and I think the features are similar. And never having used them directly I can't speak about reliability.

[lovingboth]

It depends :)

Mine is a £99 one from Maplin (not their current one). For travelling places you know nothing about, it's very very useful. When you try using it somewhere you know well, you begin to wonder about how accurate the rest of the mapping is!

Have a look at some comparative reviews and user fora. One huge issue is updating the maps. This is 'very' to 'very very' expensive.

Tom Tom aren't the 'original' but they do have very good software (thanks to someone who used to work for Psion).

[secksiewolfie.livejournal.com]

Just figure out which/any of the features actually matter to her. Voice commands for example may be neat for 5 minutes; but do you really need them? It's easy to keep 'one-upping' to the next model for more features but if they aren't features you'll really use/need.. who cares?

As others mentioned, there's the issue of updating the maps so find out how they offer updates, how frequent, cost, ease, etc.

As far as the interface, that's something that depends on the aptitude/taste of your mum.