- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 22 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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4 out of 4 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Never get lost again"
Pros: Solid, expandable, clear voice instructions, easy to read
Cons: Minor SD card issues, software upgrade issues and Garmin's confusing website
Summary: Here?s my review of the Garmin c530 after a short but intense period of usage. First of all, it?s a great little product that is smaller and more solid feeling than I expected.
After fiddling around with the unit and exploring the menus for a bit, I checked the version of the pre-installed map (North America NT v8 which is the most current as of 3/2007) and the internal software which was an outdated v.3.3. Not surprisingly, the unit had the daylight savings bug (causing the clock to be 1 hour slow) until I downloaded and installed version 5.4 from the Garmin website. (As a slight tangent, the Garmin website is a bit unclear and confusing when navigating and they lack easy to read information about which map products are available and compatible with their many units. In fact, it?s their scatter approach to product development that also leads to some confusion.). After installing software version 5.4, the unit restarted and the text on the screen was upside down and jumbled up which definitely concerned me. After turning the unit off & on (re-booting?) it worked fine and never gave me another problem.
On the road? the dual speakers and voice are very easy to hear despite the radio playing in my car. In fact, the voice has a way of cutting through the other noise quite easily. Menu navigation is fair, but it takes some getting use to understanding where all the functions are categorized. It actually becomes quite intuitive and quick to access the various features after some use. The only feature I couldn?t discover on my own and needed the owners manual for was the process for saving a waypoint (the current location). The answer: click the car icon on the map view. Makes sense when you know how. I like the various views with navigation statistics, next turn and turn page ? all quite interesting and helpful. And the timing of the navigation voice instructions are right on and well coordinated.
Satellite acquisition is superb. In fact, I went with the 5xx series instead of the 3xx series just for the better SiRF receiver and it was worth it. I simply keep the unit down on the center console by my right leg since I didn?t want it stuck on my windshield like a carrot. Do that with my eTrex and it tends to lose the signal which is not the case with the c530.
Playing around with an SD card, I popped in a 512MB that I had preloaded with 18,000 POI?s I found free on the net (Starbucks, Walmart, etc.). They were easily accessed but the disadvantage is that every time I start the unit it prompts me to load them onto the Garmin?s built in drive. As I?m not sure how much space I have remaining (I?ll return to this point) I haven?t bothered with this yet. The SD also contained a few .jpg?s so I tried the custom splash page out but undid it after seeing that the images came up small and only of medium quality. I?m only using about 1% of the space on the SD so there?s a lot of room to grow in this area.
I?ll point out that when the unit is connected to my PC via USB it seems to indicate that practically no free internal drive space is remaining. My perception right now is that 99% of the 1GB drive is already full but I haven?t dug too deep into this yet. Now some niggles and annoyances: first the unit seems to be ?on? when charging through the USB but in the car it can charge in the ?off? state. I?d prefer the same ability to charge it ?off? when charging indoors on my PC. Also, as previously mentioned, prompting me to copy the SD card to internal memory on every power-up is a drag. And finally, I?m disappointed with the Garmin website and the hiccup after upgrading the internal software. Fortunately, the upgrade did work in the end and I?d still recommend others do it.
Overall, you might sense I?m pretty picky about stuff, but I think this is a great navigation gps and would recommend it. The built in map appears to be good (hey, almost everything on the road uses the same data from NavTeq), the SiRF reception is strong, the screen and sound is very discernible and overall it?s both easy to use and feature rich.
Where to buy
Garmin StreetPilot c530:
$499.99
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$499.99 | See Site |
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