Hold on or time to upgrade?

cormie

My Nuvi 760's (I've a few of them for business) have served me very well, and continue to do so. One issue I had recently was on European trips where I didn't have enough space on the GPS itself to put all the maps so had to cut the total map selection down to 1.76gb approx for each unit, the full European map set is about 2.4GB as far as I know and although it would be very nice to not have to go through the culling process each time I update each unit with new maps, I'm not sure if this alone is worth updating the hardware and spending what would probably be €500-€1000 replacing 4 units. One easy solution would be to get a 4/8gb SD card and put the maps on this, but I don't know if the maps can be read off the SD card or if the SD card is just for music/photos which I'd never use with my GPS anyway, in fact, I don't have an SD card in any unit.

I'm just not sure how sat nav technology has come on since the 760 either? Whatever happened with one of the units, I was in London with it last week and for some reason it didn't have the map of the London area loaded onto it (I don't know how that happened!) so I had to use my phone with google maps and although I much prefer having a stand alone unit and I think it's easier to read the maps of the 760, there were some very nice features on Google map navigation, such as showing "in current traffic" times and also you can see different options as you drive so you can see the route in one colour and then an alternative route in grey and it even says "1 minute slower" etc for each option. This would be great if you happened to be stuck in heavy traffic and were wondering of alternative routes without having to go recalculate and zoom/pan etc. Of course this is probably only available with some kind of sim card/data plan.

I was also thinking it would be nice to have a tracking device where I could follow the vans online for example.

Maybe if I held off upgrading for another year or two all these features would be standard enough and far more affordable, especially with new EU data roaming legislation coming in July 2015, we can probably expect to see a lot of new data deals so could be time to upgrade then for all these data necessary features?!

Any thoughts or feedback would be greatly appreciated. If I can keep the 760's going for another bit and use the full map sets if I get a 4gb sd card, I'll probably just go with that for now, I'm just not sure if the maps can be read from the card

cormie

Ah, I forgot, another thing is that on long routes (Cherbourge to Slovenia) the 760 says it doesn't have enough memory to calculate the whole route, so you have to go searching for a place it definitely passes with the help of Google maps so as not to take you too far off the route if you were just guessing otherwise.

Also, I was going from France to Slovenia this morning, google suggested a route that was 9 hours, Garmin a route that was 10 hours, the Garmin was fighting it every time I disobeyed it's instructions but after I got far enough, the Garmin recalculated and gave a route an hour quicker than it originally suggested. That doesn't give me too much confidence and puts a lot more confidence in Google.

testicle

Maps can go on the SD card.

cormie

Thanks for the reply I was thinking that alright as a temporary solution, I've a few SD cards lying around now so can use them. Does it make reading/navigating/boot up time and slower if the maps are on the card?

eirman

If you can hold off, you'd be better off waiting for satnavs that support new Irish postcodes (due next year).

If you are fighting the route chosen by the 760 ...
> Enter your destination and look at the 2D view of the 760 route.
> If you want to vary the route, select a point that you want to pass through and press GO.
> Choose "Add as Via Point"
> Keep entering Via Points until you get the route that you want.

If you press SAVE, all these Via Points are saved as favourites called 001, 002, 003 etc.
You can use these new favourites to build up and save a permanent route (second screen - top right).
.... so your new permanently saved route would be: START => 001 => 002 => 003 => 004 => DESTINATION
Then split long European journeys into a number of Saved Routes which can be instantly loaded.

cormie

Thanks a lot for the reply. Interesting that the postcodes will be introduced next year. Maybe the map itself will accommodate for this since postcodes are already recognised for UK/FR/GER/PL etc on the Nuvi.

What I'd be really holding out for however, would be this: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057270716

eirman

When Eircodes are introduced, it may be possible to add them to newer models, but I doubt that it could be done with a 760.
It's probable safer to wait.