GPS Devices Life

combining PDA and GPS is very clever; you can have it for only $300! - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver OK, my wife had 2 items on her Santa list: new PDA to replace her ancient one, and GPS unit for her car, as she ge...

Garmin iQue 3600 GPS Receiver - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver Let me give you my history. I am a 48 year old male who had a problem and ended up with amnesia. Now I had to lear...

A couple years ago my friend started working for Garmin as a technical writer. When my husband found this out he got really excited because that meant she could get an employee discount on products, for us.

After researching a few of the gps products my husband decided he wanted to get the iQue 3600. My friend used her discount, and we bought the 3600 and the car kit. I have to admit it was mostly my husband that used and learned this product. Several other reviews said it had a big learning curve. My husband must have kept any learning curve frustrations to himself, he read the instruction manual and was able to show me the basics of use when I needed to use it myself.

GPS units aren’t tracking devices. What they do is sort of the equivalent of measuring their distances from satellites. Like you are 200 miles west of X, 100 miles north of Y and 75 miles south-east of Z so you are at point A. As you move in a certain direction your distances from the satellites change and your location changes. That is why this is called a receiver. It does not send any information to anything, it just uses the info it receives about distance to place your location. The average accuracy of our location was usually in the teens to twenties feet, but one time we had an accuracy of 9 feet.

So although it can say where you are, knowing your longitude and latitude, alteast for most people, isn’t very helpful. You have to load maps that have streets and other locations, which come included on a cd with the product, that is only Windows, and not Mac, compatible, for that information to make any sense. When we got ours it was on map version 5. Now they are on version 7. You can pay for the upgrades. The unit itself does not come with very much space, only 32MB, to load maps onto. But the memory is expandable with SD cards.

The maps on the cd are very extensive. You can search for locations by type, like food or attraction or atm location. You can also search by writing in/or using the on screen keyboard the name of the location you want to find. Or you can enter in addresses in the address book and tell it to map to those locations. Additionally you could just put in an intersection. I found it pretty easy to use and usually the results came up very quickly. Another nice thing is that if you found a location that wasn’t on the map you could email Garmin to include it in their next release.

There were a few times that the fact that the maps are only updated about once a year was glaringly obvious. My friend lives in a new subdivision. The street name was not in the map. In fact as we were driving there it looked like were in the middle of nowhere rather than on a new street.

The routes it created were based on exclusions you could put in. You could tell it to prefer freeways to streets. You could put in a detour that was set up and it could reroute you. If you realized while driving that there was a detour if you started following it the iQue would automatically recalculate a new way to get to where you wanted. The voice it used was a female computerized voice. It was pretty monotone, but completely understandable. I wasn’t ever bothered by it. The only thing about the voice was I wish it would have said the name of the street you were supposed to turn on. Instead it would say “in .5 miles exit ramp right” not “in .5 miles exit at exit 4, Main Street.”

The unit runs on Palm OS 5.2.1 and has a 200MHz processor. So not only was it a GPS but it was usable as a PDA as well. It is a little bigger than most Palm devices, but not overly so. For the most part it ran sufficiently fast, but sometimes it would take a long time to synch with the satellites to show your location. Up to 3-5 minutes at times. Obviously if it’s really cloudy and it can’t receive the signal and find the satellites it will take longer, but sometimes it would seem like a nice day and no reason to take so long.

The battery life was sort of short, at about 1.5 hours of gps use. Mostly we always kept it connected to a car kit, which allows it to sit comfortably and safely on the dash, while being plugged in to the battery charger and having a speaker to amplify directions.

The only problem we ever had was that one time the screen, which I hadn’t mentioned before, but is 320 x 480-pixel and 2.16″ x 3.24″ and easy to read, cracked. I am not sure if it was left in the car and sun got too hot or what, but we took it to get serviced and Garmin just gave us a whole new one.

You may have noticed that I used the past tense through most of the review. That is because, being the technophile that my husband is, we have recently upgraded to the Garmin iQue M5. Overall my experience with the GPS was that it was a very efficient and helpful in my own city as well as when on the road. Definitely it’s a wonderfully handy item to have whenever you travel.

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Very nice PDA/GPS combo - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver I've been using my 3600 for over two years now, and it continues to impress me. For those used to the Palm OS...

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GARMIN HITS IT OUT OF THE BALLPARK WITH ANOTHER GREAT DEVICE !! - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver After owning several Palm Pilots, filling them up, finding that my 4,500 addresses (literally) slow down the proce...

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Absolutely amazing product - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver

A complex device, but extremely useful - Garmin iQue® 3600 Car GPS Receiver