I was disappointed in the fact that it has no MP3 player as former units had, but that is just a small irritant. The main problem is that if you create a Waypoint of a friend, for example, and add a phone number, you can save the Waypoint, but you cannot save your phone numbers to your computer via MapSource.
In other words, let’s say you created a friend’s Waypoint to his house, you can add a phone number in the unit, but if you try to save it as My Current Waypoints.gbd in your computer and then transfer all the Waypoints back to the unit, all the phone numbers you added to the Favorite Waypoints you created, are gone! So you better hope the unit doesn’t one day lose all the Waypoints because although you can transfer the Waypoints from your computer back to the unit, you will again have to type in all the phone numbers! Another problem is that in the Waypoint you created of your friend, you cannot add his address.
I contacted Garmin about this and their answer was to make a “suggestion” via email. I’ve had four Garmin units and I notice that they keep cutting down on features. For example on my former Nuvi 360, you could create a waypoint in MapSource AND not only add phone numbers, but also addresses and save them to your computer and load them back to the unit again with no problem.
I will say this though, the speaker volume is dramatically louder. This is great because driving down the road with your radio at a comfortable volume, the unit’s volume is plenty loud.
Another great feature is that it is much faster than former units in pretty much all the functions. That aside, I hope Garmin gets it right in future units. By the way, Lane Assist works, but the Junction View only works in a few cities and is a feature that really shouldn’t be advertised as a main feature.
UPDATE: After using it on the road a few times, here’s my newer assessment: As with other Garmin products (which I had 4 total), there is the problem with coming out of a parking lot (for example a doctor’s office). When you get to the street, the unit does not tell you which way to exit the parking lot (left or right). So in essence, you exit the parking lot onto the street and you have to guess if you should have gone right or left. The unit will later correct you by “recalculating”.
For some strange reason, as I was editing downloaded WayPoints with MapSource, after a certain amount of time, the unit would suddenly shut off by itself. Weird..
I don’t much care for the USB placement in the back, It’s difficult to Plug the car charger into. For the money you should get a wall charger, but you don’t. The USB cord is short, where the former units had longer ones. Saving money?
After loading a certain amount of Waypoints with MapSource, it would not load anymore. I don’t know if there’s a limitation on how many Waypoints you can have in the unit, but I did a Properties check on it and there was still a good amount of space left in the drive of the unit.
Unfortunately, support is a bit bleak and a long time waiting for a rep, who usually sounds too antsy to talk to you because they have most likely been inundated with support calls. All in all, I like the unit and will keep working with it unless it gives me more problems…
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Tags: Garmin GPS Navigator, Garmin n?vi 1490T, Portable GPS Navigator