GPS Navigation
Whether you're a full time caravanner or travelling around your own City/Town chances are there will come a time if not already that you will be using a GPS navigation system. I've tried a few over the years and like anything they all improve as time goes by so i wont dive into a novel on versions that I've had 10 years ago and will focus on the more recent.
The last few years we have just been driving around local areas not venturing to far abroad so our previous in car units have sufficed. A couple of years ago we had a in car entertainment unit with a built in navigation system that did the basics and also drove me insane with constant beeping if ever we were near a rail way track. Considering we lived in the Whitsundays amongst a gazillion cane fields with cane train access every where you could imagine how annoying that got after a while.
Next i bought a in car entertainment unit that was a android based platform. The principles of an android unit + two android phones made sense as they could talk to each other easily and the compatibility of being connected when in the car would be increased. Well that was fairly true as the phones connected well to the unit but the GPS app that came with it was a bit average so i downloaded and installed......
SYGIC from google play.
Now usually i don't get super persistent with apps, If it's rubbish i normally ditch it pretty quick cause of the vast amount of options out there but for some reason i just really wanted SYGIC to work. Sygic it self had potential and when you read on the net about it a huge amount of people use and love it. For us though it was painful to enter destinations into and the sound kept dropping out along with other minor annoyances.
As i mentioned i was persistent on this one much to Suzies dislike as her frustrations with the unit would show every time she went to go add or look up a point of interest (POI).
When we started on our big adventure of full time caravanning and started to use the vehicle more than once a month it became apparent that SYGIC was about to get a hammer through its *cough * point of interest if we had to put up with it for the big lap so finally i gave in and uninstalled it and installed........
CoPilot from google play
CoPilot showed a little bit of promise when compared to SYGIC because entering destinations was a lot easier and it did live traffic updates and also, like SYGIC, it did offline maps ( which is the reason i didn't just go with google maps) unfortunately the first test drive with it didn't show speed limits and many POI's for a common holiday area such as South West Rocks in NSW so after only three days of testing it was made redundant also.
Finally we decided that considering our full-time adventure means full-time driving to new locations that we should buy a sole purpose navigation unit. After a couple of nights researching and reading reviews it turns out the top players in the market are still Garmin, Navman and Tom Tom. The top seller and most positive reviews seemed to be for Garmin. So off we went for a drive to Coffs Harbour to locate a Garmin GPS unit.
As we currently living off our savings we didn't want to buy the super duper model although that would of been nice we decided on a 6 inch Garmin 67LMT model (LMT means it has lifetime maps and traffic). It was on special from $237 to $167 at Harvey Normans and $220 across the road at JBHIFI so we picked one up at Harvey's.
I can't unfortunately give my full opinion on this unit yet because i have only just hard wired it into the ute recently but for our test drive to Kempsey yesterday we went searching for "Slim dusty centre" thinking even though he's not something we are interested in he was a Aussie icon in the country music world surely that's listed as a POI... but no it wasn't and had to revert to google maps to locate it.
Then we thought OK the building was only erected December last year i'll give Garmin the benefit of the doubt and say it's just too new so while in Kempsey, the home of Akubra (another Aussie icon) we went searching for the location and Garmin didn't even know that street existed let alone the company, Strike 2 of 2 and we had to google map that one as well.
Overall it's a dedicated GPS unit, comes with Updates and a Australian voice, has features that work and a hell of a lot more POI's than sygic or co pilot so i can't go condemning it this early on i think we just happened to pick two places we thought should be listed that weren't.
Will update with more info on the "Gadget corner" webpage of this site when i've tested a bit more.
It's a pity Wikicamps is not a GPS unit as well, as that would be awesome for travellers like ourselves. Who knows one day they might and that would give the expensive Hema some competition.