I have a Garmin NUVI 660 and love it. It has built-in Bluetooth, and the sound quality is quite good. It also has an SD slot. I have a 4GB card in it, so it's like having an IPOD in the car. It uses an unused frequency on the FM band. Setting it up is quite easy. It also has WAAS capability which increases the accuracy of the unit. I paid about $400 last year, so the price should have come down quite a bit. Anyway, my two cents' worth.

 

Finally ended up with a Garmin nuvi 350 for $199 from Amazon. It's got all the stuff I need and the price was right. Should be here in a few days....

 

Just tested one out for accuracy this weekend, outside of not having a specific address for one of the locations (thus we went in a circle), it seemed pretty accurate. These are going to be gifts for our daughters, so we did not load up the disk to learn much; glad to hear about the FM aspect.

Our thoughts - the battery life was ok, but these are not meant to be something you take in the woods. The voice was a little hard to hear with the top down as the articulation was computerish (go figure). Overall I think they were a good value from Amazon about a week or so back and were I not targeting a potential Kenwood stereo w/GPS, I'd get one of these for me and may still when I get serious. I loved it when we went off the directed course and she got a little attitude when saying "recalculating"; nothing like having a GPS and navigator getting mad at you for not following their directions

 

The 660 has a gazillion voices on it in a multitude of languages. Check out the Sheila in Australian. It's pretty cool. You can waste a few days probably checking out all the voices.

 

Good choice popeye. There are fancier units available but I think you will be happy with the 350. It's really nice when your somewhere unfamiliar and get hungary and let the Nuvi find and take you to a restraunt. Also I get a kick out of letting the GPS find a way back home on back roads you never would have chosen. It's kind of an adventure.

LOL at Erzer's comment on the voice getting an "attitude" when you miss a directed turn. It's true. I think it's the American voice that's the worst. She might as well say " You missed your turn dumb ***, didn't you hear me, clean out your ears, can't you do anything right. Now I've got to get my map out and find my way again you slimeball." We didn't need GPS technology to do that. Our wives have been saying that for years. Try the Australian womans voice. She's less bitchy.

 

I'm waiting for mine to say one day: "You know, if you are not going to listen to my directions, why did you turn me on?"

 

I vote for Magellan GPS units.

Reasons why:

1. It talks back to you when you type
2. The keyboard is much less errorprone than either the Garmin or TomTom
3. Simple to use.

Negatives:

1. Does not start navigation instructions unless you are on a road that it recognizes on its internal map. If you are in the middle of a forest somewhere on a road that GPS doesn't know, it will not start navigating for you.