After three months, I finally bought a replacement for our stolen gps. I was waiting for something decent to go on sale and this weekend a local electronics retailer had a pretty decent special. I bought a Garmin back in 2010 when I was in the US and left it with my mom. That one was cheap but it worked pretty well for us. At the end of 2010 we bought a TomTom model with hopes it would serve us well. In many ways it was quite adequate but there were a few issues. My biggest complaint was it took ages to pick up the satellite signal after it was started up. While this didn’t pose a problem most of the time, there were a few occasions when I really wanted to have it going quickly. This time I bought another Garmin model and it seems much better than either of the two devices I’ve used before although we’ve not used it properly yet. We did try it out in the car today and found that it was quite quick to pick up the signal, even before we left the driveway.

What also impressed me about this model is how much nicer the online interface is compared to TomTom. I had trouble with the TomTom from early on when it refused to accept the code for additional maps when I registered. I eventually did get it sorted out but nothing really worked very well when using it. Aside from taking a bit of time, the Garmin website looks nice and is quite efficient at doing what it’s supposed to do. I look forward to testing this one out properly in the near future.