Should we buy the nav system?

My husband had a built in Nav for his previous car, and I have a portable Nuvi 350. After experiencing both, he has no wish to get another car with built in Nav. He DID like the large screen, but other than that it was a lot more complicated to use and didn't seem to be any better at routing.

I LOVE my Nuvi! I guess maybe for women the whole portable nature of it is a positive because we have purses so it isn't a hassle to carry it. That means even when I'm with someone else in their vehicle and we get lost, i can whip out the Nuvi and all is well. I've used it sightseeing and even just at work, to see what interesting POIs (restaurants etc) are nearby. See, all you guys need to do is buy a man-purse and you're all set

The Nuvi is MUCH MUCH cheaper than a built in Nav too, and the road updates are only $65 instead of the several hundred it was going to cost my husband to update his built in system.

NOTE: I didn't want all the bluetooth functionality so I just got the Nuvi 350 and it works awesome. Only 2 things I'd change about: 1) add the ability to have more than one waypoint when creating a route (handy if you know you want to avoid certain roads...can create points along roads you DO want it to hit and force the unit to route you that way), and 2) have a button you can hit to take you back to the main menu (right now when I try to e.g. look up an address and it to my favs...when I'm done I have to back out of every screen all the way out to the main menu in order to get back to the map)

 

IMHO, the only flaw in the POI by name search is that it always lists the results alphabetically. There should be an option to sort by distance as well.

That said, there are a couple ways to get around this. First, the search does a partial search for any part of the name, so try to pick the most unique part of the name to narrow your results. Secondly, there is a "City" criteria that can be specified to further narrow your results, including a "nearest 5 cities" filter.

Alternately, you can also a POI category search, which searches by distance. To search around a particular town, try first inputting that general town as your destination, then do a POI category search near Destination #1.

Just a few suggestions...

 

I have found the Prius GPS difficult to use. I use GPS devices in my airplane, motorcycle, hiking, etc. etc… I just wish the Toyota engineers could spend a week using the Garmin brand and then take that knowledge back to their drawing boards.

 

I've had a few cars with built in NAV so far and I like the Prius the best. I've also had hand held GPS since around the time the consumer versions came out and I'm a geocacher. With that being said I'd never recommend someone buying a Prius without it. Not only does it add the convenience of never getting lost the overall display seems to be of higher quality. Although when buying my Prius I didn't even look at a non-nav version I've seen some of you post your pics on this forum. It just seems like the display is a gimmick or game compared to the higher resolution NAV unit.

Yeah, the NAV isn't perfect, but once you spend some time with it and get used to it it's pretty fast and easy to use. Is it as user friendly as a unit from a company like Garmin? Perhaps not, but it's pretty good and did I mention it's integrated?

Too many people are breaking into cars to steal their portable NAV's. Even if you carry it with you if a thief sees the mount there's a higher likely hood of him breaking in your car since so many people remove it and stick it under their seats.

With all this being said, the newer nav's may be higher quality than units a few years ago. I don't know. I do know I really like my nav.

 

I got the NAV even though I already have a nice portable GPS. It's just nice to have everything seamless in the auto for once. You don't have to plug anything in, and nothing blocks my view through the windscreen. Just push 1 button, and boom.

... Brad