Re: Garmin Quest first impressions

From: Gavin Scott (gavin_at_allegro.com)
Date: 09/10/04 

Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 18:59:15 -0000

Gavin Scott <gavin@allegro.com> wrote:
> So, those are my initial impressions (having not yet installed the
> new City Select or even taken a fix with it yet :-)

More comments:

Installed City Select 6.01 on top of my existing 4.0 and 5.0 verisons
with no problems. Mapsource was version 6.3 after the install (I
don't remember whether I'd previously installed this or whether it
upgraded it automatically).

After installing to software under Win2K and connecting the GPS via
USB, it did not find the drivers on its own and I had to point the
wizard at the USB_drivers folder in the Garmin install directory.
After that it worked fine.

I selected 112MB of maps and downloaded them to the unit. For me at
least I had a hard time coming up with enough places I might need to
visit on short notice to fill up the 115MB of memory in the US version
of the Quest. So while I supposed more-is-better, I personally would
have been happy even with 64MB, and so 115MB is quite nice.

On an 800MHz PC, the map data preparation took almost 15 minutes, but
the download of the resulting datafile took only aobut 6 minutes, a
nice improvement over the GPS V's 40 minutes for 19MB!

The USB cable that comes with the unit is under 3 feet long.

The unit powers on automatically when external power is provided, and
there does not seem to be an option to disable this. You can set it
to power off 30 seconds after power is removed or to stay on. The
auto-on is one of the things that the earlier units like the GPS V
lacked that was annoying.

While the display is rectangular, there's no "portrait" mode as the
GPS V has (the antenna orientation would not make this very practical).

Time-to-fix is at least as good as other Garmin units. On initially
turning it on it thought it was in Taiwan, but before I could figure
out if it was possible to speecify a new starting location it had
gotten a fix here in California on its own. I have not tried its
WAAS more yet.

Performance is definitly quick relative to the GPS V. Routing only
takes a few seconds, display updates are quick (though still only
about once per second for things like map rotation in track-up mode
(which may be a function of only producing fixes once a second)).

The FIND funciton for POIs whorks based on entering a string of
characters and it displys matches that contain the string anywhere
in the name. With 112MB of maps loaded, this is actually pretty
slow, and it takes up to 10 seconds to bring up a list of matches
in some cases. I may experiment with having less maps loaded to see
if this improves find performance.

The display has an anti-glare finish, but it's still quite a good
mirror, offering me an alternative rear-view or vanity mirror
depending on how I mount it in the car :-) This is somewhat
annoying. The bright backlight produces a vibrant color screen
that's easy to see. The color screen greatly improves the
readability of the screen, differentiating different kinds of
information.

The suction cup mount works surprisingly well. It sticks *really*
well to glass. I'm still playing with positioning options on my
fairly steeply sloped windshield. The tray/cradle thing that the
GPS snaps into remains fiddly to get right and requres a fair amount
of force to extract the GPS from. It's a purely friction snap-in
arrangement.

This is the first Garmin unit I've had where the "auto zoom" feature
actually seems to do something. At least when simulating a route
it's zooming in and out appropriately on a regular basis.

The voice prompts through the speaker are kind of a gimick. The
voice is a bit "tinny" and is not able to speak the names of
streets and so is limited to telling you "in 1.5 miles turn right"
that sort of thing. Mostly useful if you're the sort of person
who tends to miss turns because you're not paying attention :-)

In comparing the Quest to the GPS V and trying to answer the question
"is the Quest the ultimate all-purpose pocket-sized GPS?", I think
at this point the answer is no. The Quest, while it is expensive
and appears positioned by Garmin to be more of an all-purpose unit,
is still really a miniature version of Garmin's current line of
26xx automotive units. It lacks all the non-automotive features of
the GPS V and other units.

There is no compass page. The only screens it has are the map screen,
the trip info screen which has a mini-dashboard at the top with large
speed and smaller odometer, compass and battery indicators (these are
fixed fields) and six more typical configurable data fields below.
These are all the same size so if you want to display position as
lat/lon then the font is really tiny. When navigating there is the
"turn list" page (something I've never found other than annoying).
There's a nice looking GPS status screen, but it has to be pulled up
from the Setup menu rather than being in the normal screen rotation.

I hope Garmin will consider adding, via software update, some of the
features from their non-automotive units (compass navigation, more
configurable data field pages, an option to add the GPS status to
the main screen rotation, and maybe some geocaching or other
"enthusiast" features. After all, this is the most expensive
pocket sized GPS they have. At the moment, the number of reasons
for actually putting it in your pocket are rather limited. Without
the car mount it's not really practical to use in a car (won't just
sit there as the GPS V would do) and it's not as useful for out-of-
car use as the cheaper Garmin models.

So, a nice replacement for the GPS V for car navigation use, but
not the ultimate GPS-geek's pocketable model.

G.

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