Weekend in NRW
We had an invitation to visit Ingrid, an old friend of ours, who came back from a 9 year stint in London last year. She was holding a housewarming party in Korschenbroich, which is where she grew up and where her family still lives. It gave us an opportunity to try out our latest toy, a Garmin iQue 3600 navigation unit, when we drove up to visit her.
We bought it, because we are going to change my car soon, and rather than have a built-in unit, which we have in the current vehicle, I thought it would be better to have a portable unit, which we can both use and which we can also use in rental cars on holiday. The delivery time for the navigation unit is a lot shorter than for the car, so we already have the new unit, but are still waiting for the car, which won’t be available for another 3 months. Recent tests in magazines claim that portable units are almost as good as the fixed installations. After considering the new TomTom (not currently possible to load or buy detailed maps for more than one country) and Magellan (expensive) offerings, I decided to go for the Garmin unit, which can also double as a normal PDA. There are lots of reviews on the web for all three products, so I’ll just say that considering that the Garmin device costs half of what the cheapest nagivation system costs in the new car, it provides an excellent system for the money although a permanent installation still just has the edge over the portable unit.
The main differences that we noticed are that the Garmin, with its more limited memory for spoken commands does not give the place name to look for when turning off, whereas the built in system from Toyota says “turn right to Dortmund”, for example. And being mounted on the dashboard directly under the windscreen, the Garmin screen tends to suffer more from reflections. However, we hope to cure that with a non-reflecting plastic screen protector. We were a bit concerned that the volume of the spoken commands might not be loud enough, but the car-kit for the Garmin includes an external loudspeaker in the power plug and we had no problems, even on the Autobahn with the radio on. Both units get confused on winding roads and sometimes tell you to turn left or right if a minor road joins the road that you are on in a corner, rather than keeping quiet – the Garmin is more prone to do that than the built-in Toyota unit.
Here by the way, is an unsual shot – both Ruth and I are on it – taken in the evening at Ingrid’s housewarming:
