Garmin Nuvi 260 Car GPS - good basics?I'm shopping for a friend, looking to get a good car GPS (such as a Garmin, TomTom or Magellan). The Nuvi 260 looks like a good choice. Can anyone else recommend? I am looking for just a GPS, no fancy MP3 or video capability. Realtime traffic updates is a feature I'd like to have on it.
Laid back
Almost all are good units. The realtime traffic updates are normally through the cell pnone blue tooth link. Some are more advanced and can get infor from satellite feeds. They are the high end units. If you do a search on the different units you can get user reviews and comments. Garmin is a very well established reliable company and TomTom is trying really hard.
HDN
The Nuvi 260 is a great GPS if you are mainly interest in traffic functions. In my experience, Garmin gives the best choice of routes and most accurate details (small things like side of the road your destination address is on). All GPS units will get you from A to B, but it's the little things that make one better than another, and often you don' t know the differences until you start using them.
The nuvi 260 offers text-to speech (it gives you the street name in addition to telling you to turn left or right), which is not common in this price range. It comes preloaded with 6 million points of interest (restaurants, gas stations, hotels). This is a high number (some GPS units have only 1 to 4 million) and comes in handy when you are in an unfamiliar place and need to find a place to eat or stay overnight.
It doesn't give you traffic updates though. This would be nice to have, but you have to pay to subscribe, and most GPS traffic updates are spotty nowadays. You're better off getting information off the radio.
rykim718
I have a Garmin nuvi 360 and I love it. Here's some notes that I've compiled...
What I love about it:
You can subscribe to real time traffic – comes with 1 year free, but you have to buy the special antenna around $ 20 extra. The antenna just lives on your dashboard – nothing to install
It has North America pre-loaded – you don't have to load and unload different sections of the country.
You can change the voice from male to female and with different accents – my girl has an Australian accent – or just turn off the voice
It's completely portable – you can take it from car to car
It's very compact – much slimmer profile than others on the market
You can save addresses – I have home, the corpuses, Tahoe, and a couple of others…
You can run it on battery (about 3 hours) if you want
It tells you what time you'll arrive at your destination as opposed to how long it will take
You can search for food, gas, shopping on your current route or at your destination or where you are right now
You can hit a detour button and it will calculate a new route for you if available
You can tell it to avoid highways, traffic (with the real time traffic updates), and others
It's a color touch-screen – no cursor to maneuver
What I love conceptually (i.e., I never used but it seems really cool)
It's Bluetooth compatible so you can get your phone calls through it (you may need a microphone accessory – not sure)
It's built for travel – it has a long battery life, currency converter, sightseeing modules, plays mp3s and audio books
You can upgrade the maps on line or buy international maps
What I kind of wish it could do:
Give you the option of seeing/choosing multiple routes
Let you avoid sections of road (like "avoid 101")
You can put in an interim stop, but it doesn't tell you how long until the interim stop – only the final destination. I just wind up doing two different routes if I want to know how long/how far for the interim stop
I dont know anything about the TomTom or Magellan, but Garmin is usually recognized as the better brand.
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