GPS units

[Snowreap]

I have a GPS/Navigation system built into my car (included as part of the stereo system) and we have a standalone GPS/Navigation unit for my wife's car (a rather old model from Garmin that they don't make any more). both of these systems have built-in map storage which means that as the maps get out of date they need to be updated. this can often be a complicated process involving the burning of a disc with new data (for my car) or bringing the unit inside and attaching it to a PC (for my wife's). you can only do this until the manufacturer drops support for that model and stops providing updated map data for it (this recently happened for my wife's unit). sometimes map updates are free, and sometimes you have to pay to "upgrade" your map data. for my wife's unit, we installed a larger memory card so we can load the entire US/Canada map set in. the factory memory card wasn't big enough for the full set so there was an application you had to run on the PC that would allow you to specify which areas you wanted, then it would build (and compress) a dataset for those specific areas and load it. this was a very time consuming process (it took hours to load the entire US/Canada set) but it might have been slow only because the link was USB 1.1 -- newer models might load faster.

lately, we have been using the navigation app built into my wife's tablet (a Samsung Galaxy Tab, running Android). we're very happy with this, because it provides up-to-date maps and also automatically re-routes us to avoid heavy traffic, all for free (my car's navigation system can route around traffic also but I need a Sirius Radio subscription for that to work). but the downside of the smartphone approach is that the maps aren't stored locally so if you're somewhere where you don't have WiFi or a 3G connection it doesn't work at all.

-ken