Garmin Nuvi 770 (08/31/2007)

Review: With routing option of ?Shortest Time?, Nuvi 770 frequently suggests routes that exit from highway to narrow local roads. The drives are more winding and take a lot longer.
My guess is that its routing is based on speed limit of each section. The problem is - when some sections have no speed limit, Nuvi770 assumes highway speed which is shown on GPS.
It happened many times in US. The worst time it happened was when we travelled in Europe. We tried to drive from Interlaken, Switzerland to Zurich Airport. There are highways linking the two destinations, as shown in google map. Nuvi770 suggested a route of local roads and inside cities.
Nuvi770 is not a reliable GPS. It can get you to destination eventually. But many times, it took you a lot of longer in winding roads. Hopefully it can be improved. My Nuvi770 has software version 4.9, the newest.
I have good experience with Magellen which I rented in Europe. It has much optimal routing. The problem is that it does not have coordinate option to find destinations.

Review: Quite honestly, NOT worth the price. I was a Garmin follower, but I have seen the light. MUCH cheaper units actually do a far better job (eg, Navigon, TomTom, and others). At Garmin they think they invented navigation and that they still own the roads, but that is soon to change. In reality, sorry, but the stink!

Review:

Review: I purchased nuvi 770 3 months ago and was disappointed to see GPS tracking lags behind the real position by at least 100 feet. The unit instructs to make a turn into a street which has already passed. Terrible. I returned this one thinking i got a bad one. and purchased another new one and found out the same problem persists and i have returned that one also.I do not recommend 770 because GPS tracking lags behind by at least 100 feet. You wont recognize this deficiency until you have the map fully zoomed.

Review: I've owned other Garmin units, in particular Nuvi 350 which was awesome (and which I mistakenly "upgraded" to 770), but the 770 turned out to be a very disappointing device. I might have given it 4 stars had it been priced under $200, but it just doesn't justify Garmin's high price. Note that I updated the GPS to the latest available firmware and maps and all of the issues described below were persistent.

1. Satellite location/fix can take a very long time (minutes sometimes) under the open sky (which was getting me lost right at the beginning of the trip- some auspicious start !).
2. Bluetooth and address book integration is very poorly designed. BT was one of the MAIN reasons for me to upgrade from 350. Personally I would not even consider using any GPS or external unit like that as a speakerphone while driving- way too much ambient noise. I just use a simple bluetooth headset for that. The reason I wanted to have BT was so I can upload my phone's address book into GPS and use addresses for destination information (it seemed like the most intuitive thing to do). Guess what ? The unit simply does NOT have this functionality- all it can store are the phone numbers and not the addresses ! Furthermore, even to get access to the phone book on the unit your phone has to have an active BT connection with it. When the connection isn't established, the address book app. does not even show up in the main menu. This is just poor design.
3. Traffic map application is separate and not fully integrated with the driving directions app, though it does provide alerts in the main driving directions screen. To launch the traffic app you have to go back to the top level menu first. Same thing to return to the driving app (several clicks in each direction- common I'm driving here after all !)
4. No voice commands- well, it's just not there. To me this would be the most important feature of any GPS unit (again- I'm driving here!)
5. Poorly designed interface in general- too many clicks to get to anything. At least they could make the driving app/maps to be a priority screen to always return to it with just a single click or after a specified time period.
6. Another annoying limitation- when entering destination addresses the unit does not recognize two-letter state abbreviations or 3 letter airport codes. Also, by default the on-screen keyboard layout is alphabetical and while it can be changed to QWERTY layout, I'd think the latter should be the default (do many people use alphabetical layout ?!)
7. Erroneous re-routing- the unit starts recalculating the route while I'm driving on the very route it's calculated in the first place. Somehow it must think I'm slightly off. This frequently happened on major bridge or highways with multi-lane type of configurations. Not good places to get lost ! I just had to ignore GPS's attempts to re-route until it finally got its bearings again.
8. Inaccurate traffic info- found it to be not particularly useful or accurate in New York city. I would often be sitting in bumper-to-bumper yet the traffic app showed my route as green. Maybe traffic updates are more useful and accurate for interstate routes and long-distance driving as opposed to cities.
9. The unit has many extras like MP3, photo viewer, which some mind find appealing but none of which are of any use to me. It's loaded with extras while missing some very essential GPS functions. I realize I may be in the minority on this one.
10. This is more of a wish- I'd like to be able to change my route simply by dragging the route on the screen over a different highway, etc just like you would do in Google maps. This would be a tremendous usability improvement- setting via points to "force" the GPS into a particular route is very cumbersome while driving.

Truly, the only thing I like about this unit is that it seems reliable (no crashes) and has good maps and a wide screen.

Review: After one week of using this equipment , it reset itself for no reason, then I was unable to pair my phone with the Bluetooth , unit kept freezing , I contacted Garmin support, they have tried all they can by updating the software with no success, the unit was returned to workshop , a replacement was received , I experience the same problem again , I am not the only one as I have found that several people have the same problem on the internet. Now Garmin will not reply to my Email .. I am stuck with this unit !! I have two other Garmin units 660 & Etrex venture, I had no problem with thm

Review: My 3rd Garmin automotive unit (nuvi 350 > 650 > 770). the only reasonI got the 770 was that I plan to be in Europe this Fall, and wanted the included European maps.

My biggest complaint (or maybe just a quibble) with the 770 - and probably the entire 700 series - is that the routing algorithm occasionally brings up really weird routes. If one ignores directions that one knows are not optimal (speed or distance) and goes on far enough to force a recalculation, usually the time to arrival drops significantly, indicating the original route was not optimal. What is worrisome is that if one is not familiar with the area one is travelling in, suggested routes might be sub-optimal without one knowing. Yes, in the end you will get there, but the point is to get there in the shortest time, or the shortest distance.

The new features; track logging, last stopped location, are nice to have, although the latter was easy to simulate. Nicer yet is the automatic switch to map display after some distance of travel, rather than hanging at the previous screen for ever.

Finally, my comments on the included traffic receiver. Admittedly, I am in an area just west of Toronto, Canada, where there is no coverage. However, I do drive into the Toronto area enough to a)test this feature, and b)evaluate it.

So far, I have found it basically useless. The availability times for Toronto are limited. Worse, there seems to be a signifificant lag between what is happening on the ground, and what is being reported. usually by the time I get to a reported problem it has disapeared. I doubt if I will renew the servie after the trial subsciption expires.

Finally, my consisten complaint with Navteq maps, which are not really Garmin's problem (although TomTom at leasthas managed to deal with construction road closures and incorrect one-way instructions). Navteq maps are usually at least one year, and often at least two years out of date from what is actually on the ground, in fast-growing areas. Where I live, I all too often find myself driving across open fields! Garming ought to work with Navteq to come up with a faster up-date cycle, and at lower cost than is presently happening. After all, if I can go out and buy a printed map for maybe $20, why should I have to pay more than 3 times that for an electronic map on media that costs less. Someone in the electronic mapping business is taking serious profit.

Review: This is my second Garmin GPS. Upgraded from a StreetPilot III. The Nuvi 770 is an excellent device. I use it for business travel. When I turn it on in a new city it acquires the satellites within 30sec. No problems with POIs or addresses. I wish you could plan your routes on a PC using City Navigator and then upload it to the unit. Other than that I am extremely happy with this device. It is a little pricey but it comes with the North American and European map database.

Review: Nuvi 770 is an overpriced unit that is not much different from its much cheaper sisters. Long satellite acquisition time. Bluetooth is not reliably usable. No software to plan your trip on home computer. Does not accept an address from popular search engines like TomTom and Google. My in laws have a much cheaper Nuvi with faster acquisition time and exactly the same interface. I am not convinced with this new chip. It is just a hype. Save your money and buy a cheaper Nuvi or a TomTom.