Quote:
Originally Posted by Spazmogen
$79 is more in the range of what I would expect to pay. $99 was too much in my mind.
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I downloaded the free trial of Garmin Mobile on my BlackBerry Bold and it flawlessly navigated me through confusing Montreal roads.
Easiest and good looking graphics -- totally handsfree just like a genuine Nuvi without being too 'fiddly' like many free brands (Amaze, Spot, BlackBerry Maps, Google Maps, etc)
Wish I could put maps on SD card, but I'll tolerate 3G. EDGE was even pretty speedy on this too. At $99, it's too much, but at $79, I will consider buying in the next two months, but the Canadian currency is a bit in my disfavour (Over $100 CAD)
I used Garmin Mobile while data roaming to the U.S. a little. I used less than 50 cents of data roaming on a drive from Boston to Montreal. (The new $10 Rogers Canada US data roaming option lowers cost to $0.001 per kilobyte, or $1 per megabyte. Still pricey, but I used only 500 kilobytes of data in one day while using Garmin Mobile. That's 50 cents with the new lower-cost data roaming plan) .... Now, my data in Canada is pretty essentially flat rate, so no roaming cost while in Canada. So basically, the data roaming cost is 'manageable' for the occasional trips across the border, as it appears Garmin has optimized data compression very well -- less data than Google Maps!
The nicest part was during my drive through the 15/20/720 tanglerchange, it was able to tell me to fork right, then immediately fork left for two consecutive forks less than 300 meters apart -- I've gotten lost in Montreal more than once trying to drive through this crazy interchange, and Garmin Mobile passed the Montreal test on complete autopilot -- not touched my BlackBerry a single time. Once, I intentionally left the GPS route to go to the loo, it automatically recalculated from where I parked, so no intervention needed there either.
Subscription expired. It'll be a couple months before I feel like buying again: Next time I drive through a challenging city...
The 7 day free trail was fun for the roadtrip. Certainly definitely eliminates the need to carry a Nuvi -- it's actually better than a small Nuvi because of the high-res 480x320 screen. Just need a carmount for it, tap the address, and it's on autopilot for the entire route, so the easiest BlackBerry GPS to go to "legal compliance" with the new laws preventing me from handling loose gadgets in car. There are other good ones, but Garmin really has made 5.x work excellently on a BlackBerry Bold, and it now reminds me much more like a standalone Nuvi -- The first version of Garmin for BlackBerry had many bugs, wasn't as Canada friendly, but they improved this newer Bold version to the point where it's now seems to be worth its price. It knew its way around Boston, Montreal, Ottawa -- so it appears very Canada-friendly now.
In short: Version 5.x of Garmin Mobile for BlackBerry is MUCH better than the first time I tested Garmin Mobile on a previous BlackBerry earlier this year. It actually uses the FULL-SCREEN-WIDTH for maps -- which I like, where the earlier one used a side-by-side split without an option to use the full screen.
Note: Garmin now allows purchase from Canada from what I see on their website.