Saturday, January 30, 2010

GPS frustrations

We have owned 2 Garmin GPS and it seems that we are unhappier with the second one, more than we were with the first one. Why? Well the most recent one a Garmin Nuvi 760, seems to take up to 5 minutes to find a satellite connection, even when you are outside with no tall buildings or trees around you and then sometimes takes you places you don't want to go...What do I mean?
Well despite having recently updated the maps (like a month ago - and that's another story - the update successfully brought my computer to its knees, and I had to do a full restore!) I was still lead through the parking lot of a shopping mall to a hotel (despite the shopping mall having been there for at least 10 years.) Then last week in Florida we are on the turnpike with supposedly about 50 miles before our exit, when suddenly I am told to "take ramp on right" and so being a good follower, do as I am told, once on the new expressway I am told to go 3 miles and then "take ramp on right" and in effect do a U turn and go back to the turnpike I was on before .its moments like this that almost cause us to throw the device out the window.
So today we decided to go to Fry's and look at a new GPS, we decided to change brands and selected a Tom Tom with USA and Europe Maps included (handy for future travels) After purchasing it we went out to the car, unpacked it and decided to set it for the nearest Starbucks, before heading home. Well for some mysterious reason it was set on Polish as the base language and no matter what we did it remained with Polish on all the buttons and labels, we were able to change the spoken commands to English, but not the icons. Now the problem with Polish is that it was not even easy to guess what the labels said...so after about 15 minutes of pushing and entering all variations we could think of, we took it back into the store and asked for "expert help" - the bad news was that 1/2 hour later nobody could change it to English, so we asked for and got a full refund. So we will apparently keep on trying to get from A to B, with a minimum of errors with our Nuvi.

1 comment:

Carrie said...

ROFL!!!! OH NO!!!!