New car satnav

[Richary]

It's time to retire my old TomTom OneXL, which was worked pretty well over the last 6 or so years. The suction cup has totally given up on it (probably because it moves between the work and private car most weeks). Plus the maps are well out of date now, and TomTom want a ridiculous amount of money to buy map upgrades.

At the mega I was told that Navman have a special offer on with 3 years of free map upgrades instead of the standard 2 years. But I have heard about others that offer lifetime maps.

I like how easy it is to get caches onto the TomTom (just generate a POI file from GSAK and copy it to the SD card). I don't necessarily need the cache descriptions on the thing - the iPhone and Geosphere takes care of that.

So I want something that is:

1) Easy to copy cache waypoints to
2) Lifetime or at least reasonable cost map upgrades (or OSM compatible)
3) Has useful POIs like libraries, shopping centres, petrol stations
4) Easy to type an address into to get somewhere
5) Possibly useful to have 4WD tracks in it though I rarely go offroad lately
6) Easy to load another POI file for public toilets (I'm on the road a bit for work so this can be useful - generated from toiletmap.gov.au list through GSAK from memory).

And hopefully it won't break the bank!

[PesceVerde]

The nuvi 1450T would be worth considering.
They were "Half price" at DSE a couple of weeks ago. That low a price doesn't do smaller specialist retailers any favours, but at $149 ...

[blossom*]

Beware of the "lifetime" maps. I was told by a salesman that it really only meant the lifetime of the unit. ie when they bring out a new version in a few years, they'd probably consider your old unit out of life and so no map updates. It's not your lifetime from the way it was explained to me.

[Bronnie_1990]

I can also recommend the Nuvi (I have a 550, and from what i can recall, was pretty cheap too)

It is easy to load things onto (If i can do it...before anyone starts, i'm a gen y splashback..it's not too hard?), has 4WD routes (much to my disgust, it has asked me to go on routes that....my car can just not do!), and...seems useful, i guess.

[quiet1_au]

Beware of the "lifetime" maps. I was told by a salesman that it really only meant the lifetime of the unit. ie when they bring out a new version in a few years, they'd probably consider your old unit out of life and so no map updates. It's not your lifetime from the way it was explained to me.

"Lifetime" updates are still better than the "oh, you bought our map - not the version we used to sell that let you use it on your GPS and computer, and not the other version you could use on the multiple devices - the only one left you can only use on one device - annnnnd that we will soon update and nag you to pay for again to get the few changes we added to it in the last 6 months...") version.......

Still, with the OSM maps not really address searching properly it was worth the money at the time, and I'm glad that I will have a reasonably up-to-date GPS i my car once the inbuilt one has too many mistakes to ignore... (I must check out if there is a map DVD update for the car sometime)