Garmin City Navigator 2010 Australia Maps CD-ROM (Windows) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I just returned from a trip to Europe. For our trip we flew in to Rome, drove to a rural area an hour outside Florence, spent a week there and drove to Florence, then on to Parma, the Loire valley and finally on to Paris. I purchased this software with the Garmin GPSMap 60Cx and offer the following comments.
1 - Ignore the picture showing V6 - This REALLY is version 8 for sale.
2 - The software was mostly easy to use. The download / upload process was relatively pain free and reasonably fast. There is no need to delete the existing maps in the unit before loading a new map in - your upload simply writes over the current maps.
3 - The only bugs I noticed have to do with getting at the underlying directions for Routes you create. I found that selecting the route did not always work, but that clicking on the route on the map and then clicking on Properties to get to the Directions solved the problem.
4 - The turn-by-turn directions were mostly spot on. However there were some places in Italy where I ran in to areas that were recently / currently under construction and in these areas, some wrong turns were indicated. The most useful feature in these circumstances was the automatic recalculation for directions.
5 - When you zoom in to a quarter mile radius, the location of restaurants, local attractions, etc show up with useful symbols, sometimes with amusing results. Outside the door of our hotel in Florence I turned on the unit and saw no fewer than 15 pizza symbols (pizzerias) within 2 blocks of our hotel.
Now on to the cons
6 - The Route function does not seem to work as advertised. You are supposed to be able to create a Route between two or more points on your computer and then download them to your device. The only problem is that the Route only works if you also include ALL of the map segments between the points. With a 64 MB limit on my device, this was often impossible. The result is that I had to download subsets of the map segments for my drive from Parma to Paris and then create routes for segments of the drive. If I did not have my laptop with me, I would have been out of luck.
A couple of suggestions for version 9. Please break up some of the larger areas into smaller maps. On the segment from Geneva to Paris, I passed through the very northwest corner of one map segment for maybe 15 miles. However I had to load the ENTIRE 6 MB segment in to memory. Alternatively, if the Route function can allow you to load in only the portion of the segment you will drive through, I would be VERY happy.
Also, I was shocked to find that the toll through the Mont Blanc tunnel was 39 euros. There were also numerous other tolls along the way from Parma to Paris - totaling over 115 euros. It would be nice to know this in advance to allow for planning purposes. Considering the fact that thousands of pizzerias are pre-loaded, information about toll roads doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

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