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| Amazon ( 2009-07-02 19:04:38 ) | Dig  Rank |
| I had a 3-year old $750 Garmin iQ M5. The charging function stopped working. I contacted Garmin and they indicated they no longer supported the product. The iQ M5 did everything I needed it to do and I had just paid for maps for Europe, so I was pretty ticked off they wouldn't service the unit. In its life I had to replace the unit 3 times to fix problems with the unit. Considering I was forced to buy a new GPS, I was sure not to buy another Garmin product, so onto Tom Tom and onto a whole new generation of GPS. The pros: The 740 finds satellites very quickly. The interface is easy to use. It comes activated with their road delay data cell feed (even though their tech support wasn't sure and put me on hold for 15 minutes..by then I figured out it was working) On a trip from Baltimore to NYC it found several road delays, but there wasn't a better option to be had. It didn't detect a back-up on the south bound Del. Mem. Bridge. But there would have been no alternative anyway. It worked well in NYC under many buildings. It tells you the speed limit of the road you are on and your current speed. This data was wrong on one road by 5mph, but I liked knowing what the speed limit is. Usually Verizon kills manufacturer cell phone features so they can find a way to charge you a monthly fee for the service. So I was happy to find that the 740 was able to connect with my Blackberry Storm via Bluetooth. In fact, it found the 740 far easier than the Verizon headset accessory. Communication through the 740 on the phone works great. Using the speaker phone in the 740 worked great for answering incoming calls. It imported my contacts from the phone, but dialing from the 740 is very awkward. Overall I love the lane function and many of the other features of the 740. The cons: The semi-flat-matte LCD screen is sometimes hard to see in bright light. It's not unusable, but the glossy/bright Garmin iQ M5 screen was FAR FAR easier to see. I tried to use the cheapest gas function, but it seemed to greatly increase trip time - a 2 hr trip became 4 hr trip in NJ heading south, and I couldn't force it to find a better route - but I may not have been using it right. The voice recognition is the most useless part of the 740. It understands about 1 in 25 of the voice commands. We had fun listening to it's wrong interpretations to our commands, but it was totally, completely useless and in fact you'll get in a wreck far faster trying to use that, than entering the data by hand. I suggest you buy a case for it, so when you hide in your car the screen doesn't get scratched. I'm not sure if the Live feature of this is worth $9.95 a month, but so far I'm digging the connectivity of this GPS with road data. If they had a better screen and decent voice recognition software that would include contact name voice dialing from your contact list, this would be a killer GPS. |
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