Garmin Nuvi 3790T

Pros: Not enough to recommend.

Cons: Too many to neatly summarize. See my review.

Summary: HITS

Thinness: iPhone thinness = sexiness.

High Res Screen: High resolution capacitive screen very responsive to touch.

Voice Recognition: Mostly good and usually faster than screen-entry, but it doesn't learn accents (so not much good unless you can speak in Oxford English), has a problem with any background noise (even rain on the windscreen), and is limited in the type of addresses (e.g. not intersections) it accepts. Did I call this a Hit? Anyway a promising but not yet great feature.

Always Up: Inbuilt accelerometer that senses how the unit is oriented and automatically adjusts for portrait or landscape mode (yes, just like the iPhone).

Junction View: Clear photorealistic images of complex junctions showing route clearly with yellow arrows. If I have any gripe about this feature it is that it comes up at erratic distances before intersections & has a tendency to disappear just as you need it.

MyTrends & Predictive Routing: Will guess commonly taken routes (e.g. work to home) and will predict travel when it is in a known tunnel (e.g. Sydney Harbour Tunnel, Eastern Distributor) when it looses satellite signal.

3D Terrain: Quite useful to be able to see the terrain ahead on long freeway trips and doesn?t get in the way of routes the way that 3D Buildings does.

Map Updates: Currently free updates for life are included in the price.

MISSES

Slow to Lock: And I mean REALLY SLOW if it has been off for anything more than a few hours. Hello! Is there is SIRFII chip in there??

TrafficTrends: Powered by SUNA (the traffic alert service in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane). Remember that the "S-U" in SUNA stands for "Simply Unreliable"? 'Nuff said.

GPS Signal Lost: Floods the screen with a message that obliterates everything from view and doesn't go away until the user presses the OK button. A really smart idea (not) for a unit focussing on hands-free operation, particularly when there is the same persisting alert at a perfectly acceptable size on a bar at the top of the screen.

Pronunciation: Some truly odd local pronunciations.: Giffnocky for Giffnock and Carly for Cahill (yes, that?s right, the main expressway on the Sydney Harbour Bridge is an ex- of Warren Beatty).

Bluetooth: Simply awful implementation. Maximum volume isn't nearly enough and callers always complain about the quality of the audio via the microphone. Why did Garmin even bother with this?

Safety Camera Alerts: These seem to trigger based on general proximity in any direction whether you are on the actual road where the cameras are placed or not.

The ?Continue To? Thing: As mentioned in my previous posts this seems to be a common Garmin bug that exists on the 3790T and on my previous 765T. When the unit starts up it frequently begins to plot a route that starts a block or a street away from which I am & will suggest "Continue to XXX street". This isn't usually a problem if I am in a familiar area, but it's unhelpful in unfamiliar territory. And frankly a GPS should be navigating from exactly where I am, not from where it wants me to be!

Snap-to Street Navigation in Car Mode: The 'feature' of the Garmin to "snap to streets" often means it snaps to wrong roads around business parks and shopping centres where road detail is not fully mapped i.e. it picks the nearest plotted road instead of figuring out that I am driving off-road (or at least off the known roads of Sensis maps which is a common occurrence in Sydney).

3D Buildings: The 3D buildings in Sydney's CBD are initially interesting however most buildings with a couple of few notable exceptions (e.g. Sydney Opera House) are rendered as grey formless objects which actually obscure the route. A shame there isn?t a setting to turn 3D terrain on and 3D buildings off.

Auto Day/ Night applies to Tunnels: Good in theory except that the 3790T ?cleverly? adjust to night mode when it thinks it is in a tunnel. On roads such as Sydney's Easter Distributor which move between closed and open sections this causes regular flickering as it refreshes and re-renders between modes.

Navigation on Multi-Level roads: Confuses routes when surface and tunnels coincide (e.g. Lane Cove Tunnel / Epping Road) & takes ages to correct itself (usually only when routes have hugely diverged) prompting the Garmin to infer impossible route changes.

Conclusion:

Some things get better with repeated use, however the 3790T does not. Now that I am quite over the sheer sexiness of the 3790T, the more aware I am of its flaws & can no longer recommend it. Frankly it is difficult to reconcile the problems in this unit against Garmin's long history in producing GPS units and the supposed 'flag-ship' status of the 3790T. On the other hand I guess that Garmin will never run into problems with pre-release units bar-hopping to the tech-press (viz a viz the iPhone4) since it simply beggars belief that these units are actually tested by anyone in the real-world before being placed on the market.