Garmin nüvi 850 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator Review
September 17th, 2009
Garmin nüvi 850 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator Review from LaurenW. Frustrated Garmin Fan, I am a Realtor and have been using my Garmin GPS for almost four years. (It was the 2720 and had cost $999 when I bought it.) It’s invaluable to me in my business. Today it died as I was previewing a dozen homes and I went back to where I bought it originally and picked up an 850. Boy, am I disappointed!
The new graphics will take some getting used to, but that’s not the problem. With the newer technology and all the bells and whistles, I had expected this unit to be MORE intuitive than my old one. Turns out it’s not. Twice it told me it could not find addresses in older neighborhoods where my old Garmin never had a problem. I had to guess my way across unfamiliar areas to find them and, sure enough, once I got there, the street names registered on my screen. I immediately saw what happened but was shocked that Garmin hadn’t picked up the slight differences.
One street is named McLain Road. I typed in Mclain (small “l”) and it couldn’t find it. The old Garmin used all upper-case letters, so it found every address regardless of upper or lower case. This one obviously needs you to know which to use — very frustrating. The second one is spelled Hollowbrooke Lane. I typed in in every which way I could think of — Hollow Brooke Lane, Hollow Brook Lane, Hollowbrook Lane, etc. Now that I’m home and could play with it a little, sure enough, it found it. I should have typed in “Ln” instead of Lane and it had Hollowbrooke without the “e.” When I had typed in Hollowbrook Lane, it couldn’t find it because I spelled out the word Lane. Again, the old Garmin knew that Lane and Ln were the same thing.
Another very annoying thing I found missing on this new one which was on my old Garmin was the display of streets. Typically, each street will show up as I get near it, whether I’m turning onto it or not. With the 850 it doesn’t show streets unless they are major thoroughfares. I finally clicked on the “plus” button twice in succession and it started to give me lines (which represented streets), but it rarely showed the name of the street. Again, the old Garmin showed every street you came up to.
The voice prompts are also unreliable. Several times the voice prompt did not match up with the screen and if I tried to answer based on what I saw on the screen (for example, a city was on the screen and the voice was asking for a street address), I could not get it to sync and had to start all over or (more often than not) just gave up and tapped the information into the GPS. Again, a nice concept but frustrating if it’s not working properly!
I can’t figure out why this newer model would be LESS intuitive than the old system. I’ll play with it for a few days, but at the price I paid, I won’t be keeping it very long if I can’t figure out how to make this work better.
And, not to beat a dead horse here, but I’m shocked that the unit doesn’t come with a carrying case. I just bought my daughter a nuvi 350 last week for her birthday and it cost a fraction of what the 850 cost — and it had a carrying case! SHAME on you, Garmin!
To check price or purchase Garmin nüvi 850 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator.
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