Gradyghost:

It is a matter of price.

If I had a Garmin and could it update for, say, 50 Euros and if I could live with the limitations I would update it.

If I am running the risk of missing an important business meeting just because I was too parsimonious I would probably buy the best available system on the market. (They are cheap compared to a cancelled contract.)

But I would probably not buy a Garmin again - even if a competing product costs 50 Euros more.

Maybe Garmins are better in North America than European systems. This is also an aspect to take into consideration.

Strange, I've got the cheapest model Garmin for the UK and it is fantastic. The shop recommended it rather than the Tom-Tom (which I'd been thinking of) even though it was £100 cheaper, so I trusted their advice.

Lots of towns have more than one street with the same name. If you put in the postcode you can't go wrong.

Mine also searches for places of interest by name, (which includes things like the nearest petrol station/supermarket as well as tourist attractions etc) so I've used it several times when I don't have the actual address of where I want to visit.

traveller1959.
I recently used our Garmin670 in Portugal and France.
The difference to me between using it in the two countries:
I thought that it was easier for me to input a town or address in Portugal. I wouldn't have thought this would be the case.
In France, I had some difficulty getting the device to recognize the address of the house we were staying at originally. It had it's own abbreviation for the address.

I also had to play around with it to find certain things, as the airport in Nice. I just attributed this to my own inexperience with using the machine. I am a very new user.

But, I must say, I thought overall the device worked beautifully.

You oviously have more experience with different systems and maybe this one wasn't a good fit for you.

We used a garmin on our recent trip to northern Spain. We purchased it in February and did not update it for the trip. On several occasions it tried to take us on a road that had been replaced. Lesson learned. I must admit though that I was baffled the time it took us to a dead end road in a farm yard from which we spent about a half hour backing up. there was no new construction in the vicinity, so I am at a complete loss to explain how this happened.

The GPS in our Honda, which isnt great, does have a wonderful feature which no one seems to discuss here - the possibility to search by phone number.

Since many places in Europe, like our own house, don't have proper street addresses, it comes in very handy.

Carlux that assumes that a "reverse" directory is available - not every country allows them.

Last Sunday one of the travel writers for the Chicago Tribune had an article that was nothing but praise for using the Garmin Nuvi 270 (comes preloaded with Europe maps) while in Italy. He had little trouble and bottom line was that he would never be without his GPS again.

For those of you who have a Garmin Nuvi -

What kind of "mount" did you get? A windshield suction cup mount? Or a "bean bag" mount?

We have a windshield mount which came with the Nuvi 670.

It has worked in all of the rental cars we have used it in but it does not stick in my own car in hot weather. After a couple of hours it falls down.

I tried cleaning the glass and suction, but it still falls.

I am thinking of purchasing the bean bag mount.

In PA we are permitted to have a windshield mount unlike some states.

yk, my husband got the bean bag mount for traveling and for using at home.

The bean bag mount worked great on our rental cars in Canada and Germany. It's easy to stash under the seat or glove box when you stop so nobody knows you have a GPS.

It stays put and never slides off (one of my concerns).

My observation:

We had a Garmin Nuvi 270 for our drives through Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Croatia and Slovenia.

It performed great in CR, Poland and Austria (with very few hiccups), and we had our regular maps handy to help out when Lady G went a bit astray. It was great getting us in and out of Prague, CK, Olomouc and Krakow and getting us into Vienna.

It had a few more problems in Croatia and Slovenia, but the roads in those countries are so well marked that we hardly needed a map.

This is totally false. I have a Gramin 670 with North America and Europe on it. I just came back from touring Switzerland & Italy. The garmin worked extremely well. Took me where I needed to go.