Thursday, March 02, 2006

Choosing an in-car satellite navigation system

Last week, my wife told me that she wants to buy me a satellite navigation system for the car as a present for a significant birthday that I have coming up far too shortly. The only challenge was that I knew next to nothing about the systems, and she was relying on me to help to choose the appropriate one!

The main criteria is that it would be good if it covered both the UK and Poland. Other than that, we don't mind too much. I've been told that cost is not an issue, which is very nice (and somewhat surprising!) to know.

Initial research suggested that the TomTom GO 700 was the best option since it does cover Poland - admittedly only 18% coverage but I can't find anything better than that. It has nice features like Bluetooth hands-free calling with a mobile, and downloadable voices including John Cleese..... As a techie, it was nice to see that that particular model runs Linux, too. The concern I had is that ~50% of the reviews on Amazon seemed to indicate that the units have a fairly high failure rate.

I posted a request for information to an internal forum at work, and several people replied with suggestions. The main players seem to be Garmin and TomTom.

Yesterday, TomTom announced a whole range of new models, due out in April. I'd suspected that this was on the cards, since their existing range was available at a significant discount. Mmmm. The new TomTom GO 910 sounds amazing. May have to wait until after my birthday, now.

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