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This past Christmas, my parents really scored with a random gift that I never asked for, didn’t realize I wanted, but turned out to be something that I really like. It has now been a couple months with my Garmin Nüvi 650 GPS navigation system and it’s awesome. I will start out with some of the positives and then dwell on some of the negatives that really bug me.

Positives

A few years ago, for me it was both unpractical to get a navigation system stock in a car or as an add on accessory because they cost too much. I still think that they’re a little unnecessary because I usually know when I’m going. These units have come down significantly in price and I believe improved their usability, screen size and features. I haven’t followed this segment of the market too closely because I wasn’t in the market for one.

Some features that I really like are the turn by turn voice directions, that tell you to turn or stay straight at the right time based on the distance and your speed, saving of favorite locations, searching for nearby landmarks such as restaurants, gas stations or parking garages, the large 4.3″ touch screen and of course the many stats that you can get about your current trip like max speed, average moving speed, average overall speed, time idle, etc. There are also many features that I will probably never use, like the ability to load audio books onto the onboard memory or SD card slot and the (painfully slow) picture viewer.

Most of all, the Garmin is super easy to use. In fact, it doesn’t even come with an instruction manual (but for those technologically challenged, the manual is available for viewing online). Once you fire it up for the first time, you answer a few setup questions and then you’re ready to go. The main menu has many quick options that are handy like, go home, go to favorites, find food/gas/lodging, etc. This becomes useful when you’re in an area (like MD!) where you don’t know where the hell anything is. I’ve used it a couple times around my new office building and on the way to work. But unfortunately like all or most map systems (online map or GPS unit), it might not give you the best directions. When you manually type in an address, it will pick up the street name, state, or city within the first three letters. This reduces the time to type in the whole street name. You can search by intersection, street name, or business name, so if you don’t know any of these – just get off the road and ask someone please.

Negatives

Of course there are negatives to every product, and this one is no different. The good news is that while they are annoying, for the amount that I use it, they are tolerable.

The first negative is the way that it’s charged and mounted. In order for you to suction cup the unit to your windshield, you need to lift the GPS antenna, then clip in a mount that has the charging port. For some reason, even if the unit is off, and the GPS antenna is up, the battery is still being used. This means that you have to remove the clip/charging unit to put down the antenna. So essentially mounting and un-mounting the GPS is a three step process and requires you to find places in your car to store all the random pieces. Quite annoying.

The battery lasts a decent time. It’s rated at 7-8 hours, but I find that it dies a couple hours sooner than that. And annoyingly, it doesn’t tell you that the battery is about to die, it just shuts off leaving you wondering when to take that next turn. Some features that I wish it had, but are available on more expensive models are live traffic updates (available with an expensive add-on), and bluetooth calling. With the traffic feature, I would probably tend to use this unit almost every day.

Conclusions

I would recommend this Garmin but with caution. If you’re lost all the time, and anticipate being a heavy user, opt for a more feature laden unit with traffic and bluetooth. I’m not sure if all the models have the same mount/charging issue, but it’s something else to look in to, or at least be aware of the nuisance. For the more casual user, this should be fine, and can find it for <$300 at Costco. I use mine probably about once every couple weeks, so it’s not too much of a pain to fire up whenever I need to find something.

Any questions?  Please leave a comment, or send me a message…

Garmin 650 Site