More GPS Options

Moving on, the Duo took a look at the TomTom Go 300, a unit Steve describes as "all touch screen, all the time"--which is presumably why it comes with a cleaning cloth to get the grease off. (But are you going to swab the GPS unit while you're driving and trying to locate your next turn? Really? We'll miss you.) The Go 300 has all sorts of options, including a speaker with an Australian accent, and it offers directions in several languages. But Angela thought performance was once again a little hinky; the unit was very late to tell her about a particular turn, and it totally fell apart in Seattle's alleged downtown. The 3D display was a great improvement on the Magellan Roadmate 760's flat one, though it did have more glare. And the TomTom's the only one of the three models tested to have a built-in battery, which lets you charge it up and take it with you on a bike or a hike.

The Duo also spent some time with the Garmin StreetPilot c330. The screen is downright shiny and gets fingerprints on it instantly, but it shows its 3D maps from a higher angle that's generally easier to read than the TomTom's. And it came up with a great route in Seattle that the other two missed--exactly the way a local would go after a minute or two of thought. And yet, says Angela, it also missed a turn, lost its signal intermittently downtown, and declared "off route!" when she wasn't. And it gave at least one exit a weird name that you won't see on any of the freeway signs. It's also unwilling to show you the entire route turn by turn so that you can see whether it's taking you where you really want to go--assuming a greater level of trust than Angela puts into any gadget.

None of these units, notes Steve, is immune to screen glare. And since they don't integrate with a car's audio system the way the built-in models do, their little speakers can be hard to hear when you've got the music cranked way up. And the Duo ran into some frankly quirky problems: When they tried to get the TomTom to take them to the Seattle Opera House, it sent them to the opera's offices about a mile away. (Angela objected, but wasn't actually sorry to avoid the opera. Some tests are just too onerous.)

Steve considers the opera flub a symptom of the biggest problem with all these units, as well as every other GPS navigation system he's ever tried: the databases. Sometimes these things get it wrong, and sometimes they just get overwhelmed. When you head into a confusing six-way intersection without street signs, hearing "turn left 100 feet ahead" doesn't always help. And as the driving Duo discovered, these units can be a problem when they don't know where they are. When you come out of a parking garage in a canyon of buildings, it can take a while before the unit has any idea how to direct you. In Steve's book, there's still a lot to be said for the cheap solution that hardly uses any tech at all: a map.