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Navman MiVue and Garmin Nuvi take dedicated GPS to a new level

OVER the years I’ve tried many smartphone-based GPS apps for car navigation. But I always come back to using a dedicated GPS.

New car GPS systems

OVER the years I’ve tried many smartphone-based GPS apps for car navigation: Google’s and Apple’s default offerings, Nokia Here with its preloaded maps, and smartphone apps by GPS makers themselves, such as Garmin and offshoot Navigon.

They are generally excellent map apps that can pull in all kinds of data from your phone: traffic and weather, camera locations, restaurants, petrol locations and so on, with a minimum of fuss. You can buy mounts to place your phone on your windscreen.

But I always come back to using a dedicated GPS in my car. There are some obvious reasons. Using your phone as a GPS can chew up battery life and quite a bit of your data plan, for starters.

For me, it’s the positives: having a dedicated GPS menu system, font sizes and maps that nicely fit the display.

Besides, I have a tendency to press the wrong part of the display, which means I’m thrown back into a labyrinth of smartphone menus while driving along.

So I am a self-confessed, dedicated car GPS user — in vehicles anyway. On the street walking or cycling, I love my smartphone GPS for sure.

The latest car GPSs can give you directions based on landmarks, and can churn through past data on how drivers handled particular conditions to help pick the best route for you. Traffic data is a given, as are free map upgrades, and a host of warnings — from red light and speed camera locations through to speed limits and school and hospital zones.

Back in 2006, a Garmin Nuvi 300 cost $650. These days dedicated GPS systems are affordable yet feature-rich. The Navman MiVue Drive LM and Garmin Nuvi 2589 that I have road tested each cost less than $300. Both have interesting new features.

The MiVue is a GPS and HD digital drive recorder rolled into one. If you want to record vision out of your windscreen in case you rear-end the Mercedes in front of you, this is for you. You record to a removable microSD card with a capacity of up to 32GB.

The MiVue can be set to record continuously. In this mode it will record over older vision when the microSD card is full, but you can lock a playback file to preserve it. Navman’s player shows your GPS position during playback — it’s a nice interface.

Universal searching for addresses and landmarks such as the Broadway Shopping Centre in Sydney worked effortlessly on the MiVue.

The map interface is clean albeit plain, and the street names are in smallish print but discernible. You can pinch, zoom or slide the map to see around you, or change the theme. But that’s it. The device offers up to four routes for each destination: the fastest, the easiest (with less turns), the most economical and the shortest.

When viewing a map, prodding the screen takes you to the options, where you can add “waypoints” for travelling to multiple destinations, or detours. You can tell it to skip around a certain area, and MiVue will adjust the routing accordingly.

I particularly liked the way MiVue handles alerts. They’re spoken. They include not only speed and red-light cameras and school zones, but hospitals and sporting venues, and potentially dangerous changes to the road such as merging lanes.

MiVue has landmark guidance. When driving in Glebe it told me to turn left after the park, and in St Peters to turn left at the Town & Country Hotel. Speaker volume, however, isn’t as strong as in the Garmin.

My disappointment is that, apparently to accommodate recording functionality, Navman has dropped key functions such as traffic updates and phone integration from this model. I don’t see why this was necessary.

Other Navman units, such as the 7-inch screen EZY270LMT, cover traffic and kick in to offer you alternative routes when holdups are detected. Features such as four-wheel-drive and off-road information, and instantaneous information based on location such as the cheapest petrol in the area, are not part of MiVue’s repertoire.

Another issue is battery life. Left unconnected, the MiVue seemed to run out of juice relatively quickly, but this isn’t such an issue if you have it habitually connected to cigarette-lighter power.

It’s also hard to argue against free monthly map updates for the life of the device. My old mid-2000s GPS used to ask for $100-plus each year for upgrades.

The other GPS, Garmin’s Nuvi 2589, is a classy device with a crisp bright 5 or 6-inch display. There are two models. It’s also fast and snappy. You can move between various functions on the GPS quickly.

The 2589 has a remarkably easy voice command system. Saying the phrase “voice command” brings up a series of voice options such as “view map”, “find place”, “go home” or “find town”.

I found it easy to speak addresses and locations to the 2589 and be on my way. When wanting to phone someone, the 2589 seemed to interconnect to Siri on my iPhone, so I was able to use voice to call contacts.

When viewing maps I particularly liked the auto-zoom feature. When travelling through an intricate grid of narrow streets in inner Sydney, the map would show streets in fine detail. On a highway or a major thoroughfare, the map would zoom out to show more a wider perspective of your journey.

The Garmin, like the Navman, offered more colloquial directions, such as “turn right at the green building”, as well as lane assist. It shows you precisely which lanes to be in before a turn.

In my travels I did not see any instance of “active lane guidance”, where the screen splits and shows an animation of the upcoming intersection on the right.

The 2589 includes live traffic, which it gets either from an aerial contained in the 12-volt power lead connector to the cigarette lighter adaptor, or via a linked smartphone.

Traffic flow is indicated by colour. While trialling the 2589, I passed an accident scene and the delay area showed as bright red. When I sought more information, it gave me the option to change the route to reduce delay.

Like other Garmin models, a window pops up at the right hand side when you ask for information such as traffic, weather, and trip data. You never lose sight of the map on the left-hand side.

The Garmin’s Here maps and traffic data debuts with this model. Garmin says it uses real-time processing of driving data from navigation systems in cars, smartphone apps and other GPSs to work out routing — but it was impossible for me to see the effect this had during my testing.

This particular model syncs with Garmin’s Smart Link app. This lets the GPS display weather reports and link with personalised search engine Foursquare.

The advantage of Foursquare is that it customises the restaurants, businesses and stores it shows you based on your preferences and history.

The disadvantage is that this can suck battery juice. About 10 per cent of my battery went to the Smart Link app in one afternoon driving around.

Both do their job well. The Garmin is the more sophisticated of the two and quicker in operation, but having the ability to record through your windscreen is also an advantage.

Garmin Nuvi 2589
Price $249
Rating: 8/10

Navman MiVue Drive LM
Price: $299
Rating: 7/10

Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/navman-mivue-and-garmin-nuvi-take-dedicated-gps-to-a-new-level/news-story/8bff747640e2fbc0383f0a071b1f4a24