Has the route calculation got any better?

[nitelife]

Hi,

I've had a streetpilot i3 for a good number of years now, and it has been very reliable. Recently the plastic where the ball mount goes into snapped and I have it stuck together with sellotape

I'm now thinking of upgrading, Halfords have some good offers on at the moment and had my eye on the Nuvi 205W.

Does anyone have any experience with this mode?

The i3's are paricularly bad at routing if you're outside a city and will frequently take you down single lane or b roads where there are more appropriate routes. I remember someone saying that tomtom had an option to avoid b roads if possible, is this feature now available from garmin?

I much prefer garmin and would like to avoid tomtom if at all possible.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

TIA.

[ander02]

As I'm sure you will read on several forums maps and the routes sat navs take you vary quite a bit.

What I did was go into a local store and play with several make of sat nav, a number of them allow you to plot a route so I would enter the start and end points of a route I know well and see how the sat nav compares to the route I would take. This should give you an idea of whether it will take the same routes your streetpilot would take you.

On two of the routes I tested, the TTs were well off the mark, on one sending me a long way around the local town centre as it didn't know about a gap in a central reservation so kept trying to approach my destination from the oppostite direction rather than nip through the gap (which is what it's there for). On the other route tried sending you down a tunnel underneath the property I was trying to get to. Garmin was spot on for both these routes so I went for the Garmin.

[nitelife]

Thanks for that. I am aware that garmin have, and probably still have the superior maps.

I guess ill go and check the specs a little more I'm just interested on whether the units these days have more flexible route options.

Just wanted to know if anyone knew of hand.

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