Cool Gift Idea

My partner and I fill different buying ‘expertise’ roles. He’s the clothing and furnishings guy, I’m the electronics and gadget guy. Also, I was gifted with a pretty good sense of direction, so I don’t get lost much – but sometimes my partner does.

So I combined the two and got him this:

It’s a Garmin Street Pilot i3 car GPS device, and it works great. I did a lot of research before buying it and I’m really pleased with what it has, for the price. It’s basic, but it performs well and is very easy to use.

It comes with a map of the US, though with the chip it comes with you can only install aportion of it. (I installed all of CA, Wa, AZ, and NV). You can buy bigger chips, but I'm not sure you'd need to unless you were planning a cross country trek. The more expensive models have the entrie map already on it.

Anyway, you tell it where you want to go, and it tells you how to get there. If you miss a turn, it recalculates the route and gets you there anyway, using both visual and verbal clues. You can enter and address or, if you like, it has a database of all nearby stores, restaurants, Atms, ect which you can search by nam,e and/or category. It’s essentially like having Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Yellow Pages wrapped into one.

The only (minor) complaint is that sometimes it seems to favor roads that rational people avoid (like Divisadero street in SF which is always busy, even at 3am – and there are a slew of streets that run parallel to it, which are much faster and less congested). There is a way to change it each time it calculates a route, but I’d like to be able to change it so it avoids it when calculating.

And sometimes the search feature for stores is a little slow – but I guess that’s partially due to the mass of information. It’s much faster if you go to a sub category and search within that.

All and all, though, it’s great. It was under $300, which makes it the best bang for the buck, I think.