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Garmin is a much bigger name in the US than it is in the UK – mainly because it’s an American company, the Americans invented GPS and America is a country so big that when you get lost, you die.
But these days, we Brits know Garmin. We know them for Etrex outdoor GPS fitness devices like the Forerunner and, principally, their Nuvi sat-navs. These, while ostensibly direct TomTom rivals, offer cunning market difference in the form of travel guides and audible foreign phrases. The 670 is the latest and greatest of these devices.
Maps, music and Bluetooth
It has a high-res 4.3inch screen, which you can also look at photos on if you put them on a SD card and shove the card into the Nuvi. Maps of both Europe and North America are on board, and a whopping POI database covering places you might want to go/avoid across the two continents.
The 670 also has an FM transmitter so that it can speak road names and play MP3s and Audible audiobooks through your car stereo. And, as is de rigeur for sat-nav, it has Bluetooth for doubling as a hands-free kit. As previously mentioned, it is well built, although it has a fold-up GPS antenna that seems a little antiquated compared to seamlessly constructed rivals.
Lacking star quality
Phew. Quite a spec list, isn’t it? The Nuvi 670 does all these things, yet here it is with just four stars.
The reason for this apparent atrocity is simple: the Nuvi doesn’t quite do everything as well as its nearest rival, the TomTom 920, which is smaller, easier to use and, although it is new to market, will probably work out at a cheaper street price than the Garmin.
Comments
garryn
4 years ago
This has the brightest screen on the market and there ends its virtues. The navigation engine is terrible in the UK, making endless irrational routing decisions, diverting from main roads for narrow roads because it thinks it to be shorter, even if it takes twice as long. The direction arrow is often unclear, especially on motorway exits. The speed of routing is acceptable but it sometimes lags a second or so, however when redrawing and zooming in and out (not while driving!!) it is very slow - 5, 10 or more seconds for each change - iGo software is virtually instant. Very occasionally it locks up, but nothing like TomTom 5 used to, and needs restarting to reset. A pretty device but the joy of it stops there. I bought it for the large number of countries it covers - far better than TomTom, which is years behind other companies. Few cover Eastern Europe seamlessly as this does well enough and it recalculate quickly enough - useful for the number of times I took the wrong exit due to the lack of clarity of the arrow, but it then complicates by leaving the original route and the new route on the screen causing more navigation complications. Disappointing.