July 27, 2007

By J. Borge (Sonora, CA)

My wife and I just returned home from a 5,351 mile trip on our motorcycle. The trip went from California into Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. This GPS worked amazingly well throughout the trip. It provided lodging information and fueling information as well as complete directions for our entire trip, which I had pre-loaded before departure. Any changes we made enroute were easily entered while on the road.

Addresses were easily found by typing the address into the 2820 and then punching "Go to". We never failed to find any address so entered. This came in handy for finding laundries and other places which weren't listed in the Garmin database.

My wife carried a back-up map. On a couple of occasions early on, she doubted the GPS and we went a different way than where the GPS wanted us to go. In the end, we found that the GPS really knew best most of the time. As our confidence in the GPS built, we used it almost exclusively.

The Bluetooth feature worked well with our cell phone allowing us to make and answer calls while riding the bike. We also had the XM Radio as well as MP3 tunes loaded on the unit. When tall mountains and trees blocked our XM signal, we simply switched to the MP3, which gave us ongoing tunes to listen to while traveling.

All in all, this is a great product!

July 8, 2007

By P. Duffy (Los Angeles, CA)

Overall I love this unit. I recommend it to friends and demo it in their cars when we travel. The other reviews cover a lot of the features and I agree with most of what has been said about this unit. I've extensively used two other nav systems, Hertz's and the built in one on my previous car, a Nissan 2005 Quest. I like this a lot more then either one. I have had this for 10 months now and use it almost daily. I found early on some issues and had to struggle to not complain as I learned its many amazing features. Mnay early issues were resolved by sitting with it and drilling down into new screens and features. The review below is based on many thousands of miles driven trying to either challenge it or fine tune my understanding of it. I've driven in new areas, well known areas, learned new routes, been through challenging city environments and almost featureless landscapes. If I didn't like it so much I would not have taken the time to review it at this depth. I hope it is useful. I rarely travel without it.

Size and form: Fits in my Honda Accord glove box fine. The remote is great and key to a good nav experience for me. Screen has good room for interesting info. Found out like many cars my speedometer over estimates my speed by 3 to 4 mph at any speed over 10 mph. For the size I would have liked a speaker built in, as others have noted.

Missing feature/place for improvement #1: The buttons on the unit are okay but why not a mute button? Garmin knows there will be sound coming out of it, the AUX to car stereo or the one on the power cord, plenty of room for one. No external mute anywhere either on the unit of the remote is a serious oversight.