Garmin GPS V 19MB Handheld Navigator Review
November 3rd, 2009
Garmin GPS V 19MB Handheld Navigator Review from Chris Hann. GPS V Deluxe experience from a NeverLost user, As a personal GPS and especially at walking or sailing speeds the GPS V is fine. The display is OK for casual use and the unit is able to hold the maps for more land or water than you can sail or ride over in a day. If you aren’t in a hurry or especially demanding then you should be delighted with this unit. I have it as my primary GPS and it isn’t sufficiently problematic that I intend to replace it, I’ll soldier on and hope for some software updates for now.
For use in cars and for more demanding users there are some significant drawbacks.
During configuration it takes around an hour to load a full set of maps, 115kbps is not sufficient for loading 19Mb of data in reasonable time. This discourages modifying the map set, which reduces usability if you live round a big city.
The processor performance is borderline. For normal use the low power consumption of a relatively slow processor allows good battery life. For car use the power consumption is not an issue but the time taken to redraw the screen, which can be many seconds, becomes extremely significant. The menus are slow, it can take a couple of seconds to go between two entries in a list and I’m not even using WAAS. Routing also takes some time, mostly this isn’t too important because once you are on a route it shouldn’t recalculate often.
There are some bugs, which may have been fixed recently. When I upgraded the firmware the unit started dropping out during route calculation. I wrote to Garmin about this but got absolutely no response. That’s a mark down for customer support too.
The address entry is cumbersome. In addition, if you don’t cancel any other route that was in operation the unit will interrupt and discard your tedious entry if it completes the calculation. If it doesn’t then it will start on the new route.
Directions can be slow to paint, the wrong directions are sometimes shown until the unit catches up and swaps over to the correct picture. If one turn follows another fairly rapidly it may not tell you about the second turn until after the turn has passed, this is associated with the slow repaint.
When routing information is shown the native menus of the interrupted screen are not available, so if you have a sequence of directions to follow and wish to do something else the unit keeps interrupting and refusing your menu selections… there are no menu entries in the routing screen.
Perhaps I should have bought a more expensive model, but what could I get that is reasonably portable?
Finally, some of the routes would best be described as ‘entertaining’ or on a less charitable day ‘indirect’. For example, when the route from Via Del Oro via Bernal Road to US 101 is being followed in San Jose CA the directions will sometimes tell you to cross Bernal Road (ignoring the left turn) and then to take three right turns. On other occasions it will indicate the left turn. Routing seems dependant on precise location.
Finally, customer support at Garmin did not respond. I’d be happy to help them make this a better product, but they’d need to be interested.
12/21/2004
Last time I checked there were no further software updates, so it looks like Garmin aren’t interested in their legacy customers. That means my next GPS will have to be from someone else.
I found another routing amusement. Returning from the far north of California I didn’t include the Marin county maps but I had included Sacramento because I had intended to return on I-5. When I got well down US101 (a mountain range and probably 70 miles off I-5) I was getting crazy arrival times. Eventually I found that at Ukiah it wanted me to turn east and cross to I-5 because I didn’t have the detailed map for the next hundred miles of US101 to Richmond where the bay area maps resumed. It should not favor the downloaded maps to this extent.
On the bright side this and my old GPS III+ continue to function almost as advertised. Years of faithful, if slightly eccentric, service.
12/17/05
I now have a Tomtom Navigator 5 and their Bluetooth GPS receiver and iGuidance 2.1.3 for Europe. The newer software and receiver puts this old machine in a better light than you might think. True the SIRF III receiver is significantly better than this old Garmin. It may be old and slow and hard to use compared to the newer machines, but it does have an almost clairvoyant ability to correctly estimate trip times. If you are looking for an instrument that can record tracks and will show you a lot of current data (course, eta, time to destination, altitude, track, bearing to destination, time to next waypoint, distance to next waypoint, altitude, speed, time of day, date, trip distance, trip time, …) then this will be a lot more use to you than the late 2005 Tomtom and iGuidance software. But for them my PDA has the high detail maps for the entire US, Canada and UK and it took less time to install than it takes to copy half the bay area to this unit.
If I’m heading for the woods or the water this is still the best GPS for me.
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