bramfrank's Full Review: Garmin Quest¿ Car GPS Receiver
Are you navigationally challenged? Do you get lost going to the market? Do you like gadgets? If so, then you may want to consider buying a GPS navigator.
Navigators use the US Army's constellation of satellites to locate your position on the globe. Coupled with information on streets (their direction, turn restrictions and such) as well as address data, you can get from anywhere in the units' memory to anywhere else simply by 'pointing' to it using an address or a 'waypoint', which is a 'point of interest' - a place, restaurant, service, hospital or other entry in the database that is provided along with the street data. All very convenient, especially if you are visiting an unfamiliar area.
Garmin's Quest was released about a year and a half ago and was a hit. But it has been replaced by the Quest-2 and this model is now available for huge discounts from the original price, making the unit an unbelievable value for those who can live with its limitations.
Intended to be used by people who need to travel, it was the smallest integrated navigator on the market at the time and essentially took the technology of the day and squeezed it into a very small package. Think 'dwarfed out Streetpilot-III'.
It is very fast on screen redraws and performs all of the functions of its larger brothers;
Equipped with a database of Points Of Interest (POI), one can locate businesses, hospitals, government buildings and get directions for them from the unit, spoken in real time. It's not necessarily going to take you to the front door, but it ought to get you in sight of the destination. For some reason, every release of the Maps I've tried has my home on the wrong side of the street.
A very bright, fairly high resolution 2 inch color display (MUCH too small for my 50 year old eyes) and a series of buttons comprise the man-machine interface.
Operation of the unit consists of plugging the car plug into the cigarette lighter outlet of your car, placing the unit on the dashboard and driving. The display will allow you to see were you are, how fast you are traveling and will display the upcoming street names as you go.
If you have entered a destination, the unit will display the distance and time to next turn and will provide advance warning of the upcoming navigation, displaying a zoomed-in representation of the intersection with arrows depicting the action to the taken.
Equipped with 115 megabytes of available internal memory and without any expansion slots, this battery powered diminutive device is an excellent unit for transportable/portable handheld/automotive operation. The rechargeable internal battery pack can run this unit for up to 20 hours.
But it is not perfect. And the main complaint I have has to be that limited memory.
115 megs may sound like a lot - and for the typical non-moving city dweller it IS. You can load a pretty large swath of countryside into a navigator within those limits - by way of example: Draw a horizontal line across the USA just south of Savannah Georgia - Everything south of that line and east of Lafayette LA inside the continental USA comprises a full memory load - that includes Baton Rouge, Mobile AL, all of Florida and a whole lot more. It sounds like a lot and for most people, it is.
However, if you travel you will be forced to carry a laptop. Because this unit does not support removable cards like the 2610, 276c, Streetpilot and virtually all of the other units from Garmin that don't have the entire of the USA installed on delivery.
Most (if not all) navigators support a 'tracklog'. The tracklog is a series of data points that the navigator uses to remember where you've been and when. Based on this information you can reconstruct a trip and determine how fast you were driving. You can also use the tracklog to automatically calculate a ‘trackback’ using the reverse of the route you drove (or hiked) to get where you are.
With a 10,000 point tracklog, the Quest can store about 1500 miles of road. Most other Garmin automotive devices have 1/5th the memory.
Why is a tracklog important? It can help you rediscover a great scenic drive. For my part I was able to use the information in the log to successfully fight a speeding ticket.
Garmin's Mapsource application is provided with the package. This software is used to determine what maps are to be loaded into the unit using the included USB cable. Mapsource is also used to extract and analyze the tracklog data, to edit waypoints (which are essentially either stops along the way or endpoints to a trip) and to plan routed outside of the unit. The maps in the Mapsource package cover all of the continental United States and Canada, along with millions of POIs.
In my opinion Mapsource is an essential part of the navigation experience. And interesting enough, while the Mapsource product itself is available for download from Gamin, the maps are no longer provided with their 'preloaded' navigators - so with those you are limited to what Garmin calls basemap data (major roads only without any detail), Having the Quest provides you with a PC-based map that can be used to plan trips, see the points of interest, perform routing, plan waypoints and so on. To do it on the 'preloaded' ones requires an extra $150 investment in a map.
Aside from the rather limited memory (not a limitation for the vast majority of us) I'd have to say that the rather spindly antenna represents a potential liability - and the very small size of the display is also a factor worth considering before dropping any significant money on a unit.
However the Quest is now available for less than $300 and as such is an amazing value - being 'frugal', I would seriously consider purchasing this model as my 'daily driver, for the price alone if I wasn't already equipped with the higher-priced, but much more capable 276c.
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