Which SatNav

[Mr Larrington]

Lifetime updates for Emily, who is a Garmin of some sort, was about ninety notes but that's for UK, Europe and North Leftpondia.

[mmmmartin]

I have had a Navigon for many years. It was £113 and included maps of the whole of Europe, including - for instance - Albania. The price included map updates for two years. Before the end of the two years I tried to update but the website helpfully told me this wasn't needed because there had been no map updates in the past two years. Now a map update is £30. The damned thing is tricky to fire up and counter-intuitive to use.
The lesson is that the manufacturer of the unit is irrelevant. The mapping is.
Having said that, I've used it loads of times in the UK and abroad, in Belgium and France. Not really had a problem, after all, not many roads change and not many motorways are newly-built.

My mate had a Tomtom unit: it was designed to be very easy to use. Designed for people in the US market, who were stupid enough to elect Trump.

[Mr Larrington]

Finding myself apparently driving along rivers and across lakes and fields was what prompted me to cough for the updates.  At least one of them was actually on a frexhly-built road.

[Kim]

My mate had a Tomtom unit: it was designed to be very easy to use. Designed for people in the US market, who were stupid enough to elect Trump.

TomTom remains the only one I've come across with a user interface that's almost but not quite entirely^[1] barakta's-mum-proof.

WTF is it with car manufacturers and their built-in ones?  Are they legally required to be awful?


(Agreed that for someone who can get used to software quirks it's all about the mapping.)



_{[1] At some point she forgot that "Enter city/code" was prompting for either a city or a postcode, and complained that it couldn't do postcodes.}

[Torslanda]

A distinct disadvantage of Peugeot's satnav is the inability to enter a complete postcode. It takes the first part e.g. M24 but then requires you to select a street name, something you don't always have.

Others I have used allow this making it possible to get somewhere with a postcode and a house number.

Also using a click wheel and/or up & down arrows to select letters and numbers does not make for quick programming.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

re 3) above, I have noticed sometimes she is a bit late, or simply tells you to "enter roundabout" without telling you the next step so you have to glance at the screen to see; but if you tap the bottom right of the screen (where it gives the distance to the next turn) she goes into a more detailed mode and will give you the instructions. 

If you mount the unit close to hand you can do that tap without looking at the screen or taking your eyes off the road.

Aye, I do that, but honestly am findin it easier and less difficult to have her on mute.

I've a TomTom which I had in the vehicle at the same time as the built in job. 

Unfortunately threading my way through Paris the built in was very slow with the instructions and the screen is too complex to look at too much whilst in Paris traffic. 

So I turn off the car Satnav and rely on voice control from the TomTom without ever looking at the screen.  It works a treat as the instruction are given in good time and then repeated.  Don't mind driving through Paris under satnav, less pleasant was Avignon where the locals are more agressive and territorial or maybe it was just the 35C temperature.

Have had the TomTom over two years with lifetime updates that I use.  Before that it was a Garmin and no updates, prefer the TomTom interface as I often direct it to places I have only a vague idea about an address.