Garmin Nuvi 770 user reviews

Pros good screen

Cons overpriced and

Summary 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.

Pros reliable (no crashes)
wide screen

Cons many- see review

Summary 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.

Pros Clear screen. Clear voice commands.

Cons Won't stick on the windshield. None do that very well.

Pros Europe maps in addition to US (I have not tried europe), Bluetooth technology (works satisfactorily)

Cons IRouting is not satifactory and GPS tracking lags behind by at least 100 feet

Summary 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.