Garmin cf Que 1620 North America (010-00290-00)

Rating:
Summary: The most frustrating, useless, agrevating product I've seen.
Review: DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT.

It's as simple as that. I bought this product to use on a European Vacation. It arrived the day before I flew, and was utterly useless. I'm just about to send it right back to the supplier.

GPS Systems are meant to take 5 - 15 minutes to locate themselves on first try. This took OVER AN HOUR.

On 2nd try, they are meant to pinpoint their locations very fast. I left this GPS system outside under clear view of the sky for over 20 MINUTES, and after that time it hadn't even managed to get a lock on ONE SINGLE SATELLITE.

I'm not sure if the antenna is just to small, or what the problem is, but it is completely unusable.

Don't waste your time, or money. Buy something else instead.

Rating:
Summary: Very Satisfied User
Review: I've been using the cf Que 1620 in my HP iPAQ for over 4 months now and am very satisfied with it's performance. Unlike the previous reviewer, I have not had major issues with the GPS unit locating satellites. I have used it in many areas of the US and Canada.

For the initial setup, it is very important that the correct Base Map for the area that you are physically located in is installed, otherwise, the GPS cannot coordinate with the satelite with the mapping software properly. Normally you would choose the North American base maps. The unit shipped from Amazon only includes the North American City Select maps which are needed to get local roads, landmarks, and Points of Interest. Maps for other areas of the world are available from Garmin. In addition, the documentation is fairly complete and will explain how to get the GPS to find the satellite quicker under "Initializing the GPS Receiver" in the Applications Guide.

If you purchase the unit and it comes with the version 5.0 of the City Select maps, contact Garmin and they can get you upgraded to the current version. This happened to me and since I had purchased the unit just before the upgrade occurred, they upgraded me for free. I thought this showed excellent customer service. The upgraded maps had all of the exit number changes that have occurred in my area as well as new street names for new housing developments.

Some basics: Your Pocket PC based PDA will need to have an empty CompactFlash (CF) slot for the GPS antenna that comes with the unit (it also has 64 MB of memory space in the same assembly). Since my iPAQ had a Secure Digital slot (like many PDAs) but no CF slot, I had to purchase a CF sleeve for the iPAQ as well. I'm tempted to buy a iPAQ 2215 since it has both slots in the case (no need for the sleeve).

A couple of specifics: It is a very good idea to make sure you are running MS Pocket PC 2003 operating system. My iPAQ originally came with Pocket PC 2002 and the Garmin had many problems locking up along with very slow performance. Once I upgraded, the difference was tremendous. The Garmin CF Que 1620 is now very stable and fast. The bigger the memory card, the more maps you can store. For example, a 512 MB SD card is able to hold the Northeast & Mid Atlantic U.S. from Virginia up to Maine, the Dallas - Ft. Worth area, Southern California, Idaho, and Utah (with some room to spare).

The Negatives:
- Having to add the CF sleeve made the unit thicker than normal. As a result, the supplied dash mount does not hold the unit as securely as it normally would (it still is adequate though)

- The speaking volume for directions is too low if you have a noisy interior (or if you play your music loud). I found two solutions for this. 1) I bought a set of portable powered speakers and connected them through the headphone jack. 2) Bought one of the Belkin Tunecast II Mobile transmitters to broadcast the directions through the radio (which I take on trips with a rental car - nice and small).

The Positives:
- Excellent customer support. As I mentioned above.

- The unit responds very quickly when a re-route is required (especially with all of the construction that is going on seemingly wherever I'm going...) It always gets me back on-course. Its great to get around traffic jams too.

- Lots of flexibility in choosing how the maps will be displayed while driving. For example, the default is for the unit to zoom the map back and forth depending on your location while I prefer to see more detail of the side streets along the path that the car is taking. Uncheck the Auto-zoom box if you don't want the zooming.

- I tested it head-to-head against the Hertz NeverLost GPS system. It was as good and at times much better during my test in Southern California. The Garmin user interface was much easier to use.

- Lots of POIs (Points of Interest). I'm on the road alot and I really appreciate how it can find my hotel, nearby restaurants, fast food, golf courses, airports, gas stations, etc. quickly and accurately.

- The unit also comes with a matching version of the software that loads on your PC. It is very convenient to create the Waypoints (which I can use as Origin or Destination points) on the PC, then have it download into the cf Que. From there, you just select the Waypoint and tell the Garmin to Route to It. It gives you the estimated time of arrival along with the mileage. You can also configure your iPAQ to show Turn-by-Turn instructions with a touch of a button.

Overall, it is an excellent unit. Now that I've used it for a bit of time (everything "high-tech" has a learning curve), I'm more impressed with it every time I use it. Even my techno friends are impressed. Well worth the money. As usual, Amazon got it to me quickly as well.

Rating:
Summary: Took a chance
Review: This device works wonderfully and is very accurate. I have an IPAQ 2215 with a 1gig SD card and I have not had any issues downloading maps, routes, etc... If you are thinking about doing some research on this, stay away from pocketpcmag.com. The 'mantra' of the 'expert' on that site is if you are not buying bluetooth then it sucks.