vehicle gps units

I have a Palm Tungsten T2, and bought the Navman GPS 4460 to provide GPS capability for the occasional road trip and/or business trip. I had also considered the Delorme Earthmate, but decided against it based on some feedback on the web regarding the accuracy of the maps and lack of voice guidance. The one review I did find on the relatively new GPS 4460 convinced me that this was worth investigating.

The GPS 4460 comes with the GPS receiver unit, a couple of mounting brackets for the receiver and the Palm PDA, a memory card reader, a 12V car adapter for the receiver unit, 3 AAA size batteries, and 4 CDs of software/maps. The receiver unit fits nicely into its associated mount, which can then be easily attached to the inside of your rear window. This assembly is held in place to the window by a suction cup. The PDA can then ride up front with the driver in it's own cradle (usually plugged into a cigarette lighter socket).

The software for the PDA is excellent, as are the maps (as far as I've tested them, that is). Entering destinations is easy once the maps are loaded onto the SD/MMC card (which you must have and is not included in the kit). The voice guidance is clear, if a bit confused at times (i.e. it can ask you to bear left and make a right turn, even though the visual map indicates that you should keep going straight). The best work round for this, as always, is the judicious use of common sense. The visual cues (when you can safely look at the display while driving) are also excellent. As a PDA is used as the output/display, screen contrast, brightness and audio volume are are limited by the PDA you have on hand. So far the T2 has performed acceptably except in bright sun light (when the display becomes nearly unreadable).

Now for my MAJOR peeves with the system - the installation software and instructions are UNFORGIVABLY bad. First, you need to purchase a SD/MMC card for map storage etc - this is not provided in the kit. Second, installing the desktop software crashed my computer (because it tried to it's own drivers for an existing card reader I had in place - something I had to go back and fix). Third, when I tried to activate the software (and followed instructions on the screen and quick start guide), it was in no way clear that THE SD/MMC CARD SHOULD BE IN THE CARD READER AND NOT IN THE PALM. What activation does (I'm surmising from experience) is to install the license key onto the SD/MMC card. Once that is done, the software on the PDA will work (because it sees the key when the SD/MMC card is in the PDA) and the Map transfer software will work (because it also sees the key when the SD/MMC card is in the card reader). Fourth, I got memory errors on the PDA when I first tried to run the software (which were fixed with a soft reset, but none of this was clearly mentioned as a remote possibility).

So in closing - the unit is working great now that I have it running. Getting it up and running was a problem as noted above. Some better/clearer documentation on the installation front would have been nice. Had it not been for the lousy install, I'd have rated this as a 5 star product.