Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 769
 Janky GPS, no Traffic as Advertised, March 7, 2010
Michelle Alexandria (Arlington, VA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm in the market for a new GPS to replace my old Navigon 2200 GPS. Tried several models and purchased this one during one of Amazon's many GPS sales. I found this GPS a bit annoying to use. First I purchased the WT model which claims to include the Traffic, but it actually doesn't. It uses MSN Direct as it's traffic monitor but it never explains how to actually activate it, even though it constantly prompts you to everytime the unit starts up. I'm assuming I have to do it by plugging the unit into my PC. But the free MSN traffic only lasts 6 months, after that you have to pay.
I tried out the free trial of the Safety Camera subscription. This doesn't seem to work well at all, it was very random on the safety notices - when I looked around I didn't see a single Safety camera. I drove around the beltway for a few days then on the fourth day all of a sudden there's a safety camera warning every mile on the beltway. There are no Safety cameras on the Beltway, so where it was pulling this data from, I don't know.
It has a really good POI database, I used it to find eating places around my new office location and it worked flawlessly.
This unit fails at it's most basic function which is giving directions. It's excellent once it catches on and calculates, but a lot of times when you are leaving an Office Building, or Shopping Parking lot, it refuses to navigate it's way out of such areas. All it'll say is Go to X Street, or X Highway with no directions on how to actually get to X Highway. It doesn't tell you which way to turn or anything, sometimes the road you need to be on after leaving a Parking lot is 2 or 3 blocks away. It was annoying beyond belief. Some days the Voice Direction worked, others, it didn't. Sometimes the refresh is a few seconds slow and the directions will lag by a few seconds - so if you have to make a sudden turn this may cause an issue.
I like the favorites function, but I don't like clicking 3 times just to get to it.
The positives of the unit are, it has a pretty interface with big colorful icons, the POI db is really good, very accurate once it actually starts navigating, the fonts are all nice and big. I also really liked the holder, it felt solid and gave enough room where you can bend it in just about any direction. Unlike Tom Tom's which was so rigid it broke the minute I tried to move it.
I also hate feeling nickel and dimed, when you plug the GPS into your computer and go to the Garmin store, there are a bunch of really cool optional features for this unit but everything costs $80 or more. So if I wanted things like traffic, speed cameras, special maps, etc... It'd cost me another $200 or $300. Not cool.
I ended up returning the unit. The GPS hunt goes on...
 Gadget that Frustrates March 7, 2010
Victor Cannon (Seattle, WA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Had my Nuvi 265W for over three months now, with not much success in finding out what it does, when it does, and how I can reproduce what I just managed to do once. It is not just this model; I am sure all others are using the same algorithm to frustrate the user. I set a course without opting for "do not use main arteries" (or something like that) and found myself on the five lane I5 (in Seattle it bisects the city) having to enter from the leftmost lane and exit at the right within 500ft. It was a scary experience to cross fast traffic within such short distance. OK, next time I opted for "do not use main arteries", this time it took me to my first turning in the middle of a bend where I could not see the traffic coming from both ways. The software is not smart enough to make the optimum choice for the course; the user must opt one or the other and hope for the best. I tried it on courses where I knew the roads to be both shortest and traffic-free, yet it wanted to take me into crowded and more roundabout routes. I have not been able to bring up the "via" option reproducibly; I have no idea where this resides in amongst the options. It seems it pops up once in a while but totally irreproducibly. I found it pretty useless to plan a long trip. I wanted to replace the destination I had already entered; the only way it would do was by erasing it, although I saved that address, later I could not find it anywhere. In summary, the hi-tech device is not serving its purpose as I expected, and has become a source of irritation.
 Garmin nüvi 265W/265WT 4.3-Inch Widescreen March 7, 2010
Raffaele (Morrisville, PA USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
With apologies to those folks who are really impressed with the Garmin nüvi 265W/265WT 4.3-Inch widescreen and rave about it, I have to say I consider it highly overrated.
The unit's voice/speaker is tinny, muddy, and too low in volume, even with the unit's volume control cranked up to 100%. The street address input is not intuitive: the thing asks for a house number before it requests a street name.
Unlike my five-year-old TomTom GO700, the Garmin doesn't give immediate voice instruction when you first input a new destination. As soon as I turn on the TomTom [still working after five years, mind you !], while the car is still sitting in my driveway, and punch in a destination, the TomTom gives a correct and authoritative command ['"Turn right !"] to get me onto the street in front of my house. The Garmin only displays a bit of screen text that tells me to drive to a screen-indicated street map position. That's fine in my driveway, but when I'm at a five-points intersection in heavy traffic and punch in a new destination while waiting for the traffic lights to change, I don't want to have to take my eyes off the road long enough to figure out exactly where the Garmin wants me to drive. There's no excuse for not having timely vocal turn-by-turn instructions.
The road distance-to-target estimates are frequently off -- in more than one case, by a tenth of a mile.
The route recalculation is slow and labored. By the time the recalculation has been done, I'm usually already past the turnoff for the alternative route. Just this week, I had to pull over for nearly half a minute to give the Garmin time to recalculate my route after roadwork forced me to miss a turn.
These are small criticisms, I know, but important. If TomTom didn't have these problems five years ago, why does Garmin have them in 2009/2010 ?
On the basis of its performance since early December, 2009, I'm going to continue using the old TomTom for most purposes, with the Garmin as a backup for use in unfamiliar areas, where its maps are probably more up to date. Either that or I'll just give this to one of the kids and buy myself a more-recent-vintage TomTom.
I'll update this when I give the Garmin its trial-by-fire as a walkabout device in a large city.
 Great 1st GPS March 6, 2010
EA~ (Los Angeles, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Purchase for my wife to help her get around town.
Very useful. Great 1st GPS. Everything I expected and more. Not sure what other glitzy nifty gadgets more expensive units come with, but this GPS helps get from A to B perfectly. The traffic updates are great also. You can get traffic information by simply charging the unit as the charge has the traffic receiver integrated in it. Easy to mount on your dash, or use the suction cup to stick to the front window.
The touchscreen has big bold letters that are easy to find. It does lag a bit, but its easy to get used to. The auto-fill function is pretty neat in case you don't know how to spell a street/city. After a few letters it brings up matching names. If the city/street you're looking for isn't on the list- then you've already started misspelling it. THankfully the auto-fill feature comes up after about the 3rd or 4th letter- so your margin for error is small.
Went with the 265WT model because MSN will be discontinuing their service on the other models (such as 285WT) whereas this model is powered by Garmin and I don't have to worry about an expiring services. Easy to read map. Turn-by-Turn Voice directions. Touch screen. Practical. Portable. Perfect!
out of date maps March 5, 2010
L'ours
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
My first GPS. Used only for local travel thus far, and for the purpose of verifying the accuracy of maps in areas well known to me. Multiple errors: (e.g., "turn right" when in fact one should turn left; "turn left" which in fact would have you going the wrong way on a major road and having a head-on collision; "turn left onto Fayetteville Road" when in fact you are already traveling on Fayetteville Rd.; not taking note of a name change on the road you are following; not knowing that Lakeshore Drive is not the same as Lakeshore Lane; poor choice of routing). I tried to itemize and report these errors to Garmin but without success in transmitting that report via email. I would also suggest to Garmin that the voice should announce when you have crossed major intersections while going straight ahead (as instructed) for several miles. Finally, for stupid people like myself, please say in the set-up instructions that one must remove the protective plastic cover in order to actually see the screen itself.
The $170 price paid to Amazon for this Nuvi 265WT is low enough that one accepts deficiencies in the device. I expect it will be helpful on longer trips and in cities in which the maps are well established.
Showing reviews 6-10 of 769
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