New Satnav advice
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Discussion

lowdrag

Original Poster:

13,180 posts

241 months

Tuesday 28th May 2013
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I have a Tomtom XL1 which I bought from Halfrauds a year back on special offer and it is driving me nuts with the directions more than usually laughable. Perhaps they are all the same but travelling from France to the UK it asks me if I want to take the ferry. Tell it no and after five minutes it finally can't find a route. If at Caen it tells me to go Calais to get to Winchester, not take the ferry from five miles up the road. It can't even recognise the road opposite my house and yes, I've updated the maps. I don't need bells and whistles, just a fairly basic unit so can the great and good here give me any advice.

TypeRTom

520 posts

185 months

Tuesday 4th June 2013
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Just ordered a Garmin 2445LMT from Amazon for £90. Seems to be bit cheaper than the equivalent TomTom models and I wanted to try something other than a TomTom. Garmin support have also just told me that the only real difference between the 2445 and the 2447 (the new replacement) is the route calculation engine, but probably not worth paying another £40-50 for given that I'll look up longer (more complicated) routes on Google Maps first then drive that route and let the sat nav recalculate.

If I remember I'll try and post some feedback once I've tried it out.

Eugene7

741 posts

222 months

Tuesday 4th June 2013
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I've given up on the separate SatNav units, and have Sygic on my smart phone.

Near perfect, and way better support that the big manufacturers...

andy-xr

13,204 posts

232 months

Monday 17th June 2013
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Eugene7 said:
I've given up on the separate SatNav units, and have Sygic on my smart phone.

Near perfect, and way better support that the big manufacturers...
Same for me re standalone units, except I've gone for Navfree on the iPhone.

Having everything on one device is much easier to deal with, ie rented a Renault Traffic over the weekend for a house move, took it down to Cheshire to pick up a sofa. Paired the phone via bluetooth to the van, fired up the map and listened to music driving down. The nice thing with Navfree is that it lowers the music volume to jump in with voice guidance at a level that's just lower than the music volume, so there's no shouty shouty. Got back home, jumped in my car, plugged it into the head unit and carried on listening where I left off

I've not bothered with the Traffic update or speed cameras, but you can buy them for £13/yr

totesmate

4 posts

158 months

Thursday 20th June 2013
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New on here - this just saved me a packet -
My new Z10 is good but eats battery - turned off NFC (which is set to on as default) much better
I guess I'll just buy a battery pack and mount