We know they don’t ask for directions and pretend to know exactly where they are going.  It can be hours before they admit to having no clue to where they are and half the time they find it purely by accident.  Going somewhere with a man can be really frustrating.

So what would you say if I told you I can take all the guesswork out of trying to find somewhere new, or somewhere you have been before but maybe get there faster.  How about you have an unplanned detour and aren’t sure where it will have you end up.

Well if all this sounds too good to be true, I am happy to say it’s as good as it says it is.  I am talking about Satellite Navigation and the Garmin Nuvi 310 to be exact.  I bought this for my husband as he travels regularly and often has to attend meetings in other cities and I bought this one especially for it’s size, small.  He can carry it round in his laptop bag.

Like most electronic gadgets these days it has heaps of features you will probably never use like bluetooth hands free for your phone, MP3 player and Audio Book. The hands free is pretty hopeless and who needs another MP3 player or an Audio Book. The main thing is that it does its core job, navigation, very well.

One thing people don’t often think about when they purchase a Sat Nav is that the data (maps and points of interest) held in the device when they buy it, will get out of date. The manufactures usually offer some sort of update service where you can get updates to load on your Sat Nav. Some offer them for free but others ask you to pay for them. But few do them more often than once a year. The best thing about purchasing a Garmin device is that Garmin are one of the only manufacturers who have third party mapping tools available. This has allowed a group of smart kiwis to create “The New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project” which provides free Map and Points of Interest (POI) updates for Garmin Mapping GPSs (Sat Nav). The project is based around a forum where users report issues or bugs and regional mappers pick up the reports and make changes to the source maps. Usually within 24 - 48 hours a revised version of the map is available for download.

You can find the “The New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project” at http://www.gwprojects.org/gps

Rating: 3.5 (used with The New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project data, 4.5)

Price: $472.17 from www.ferrit.co.nz

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Technology, Men. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.