S60 SatNav Review: Garmin Mobile XT

This review is a big one. Because I want to be as thorough as possible, I dive into all the settings and options I can find. If you’re thinking of buying, you will have as good an idea as possible after reading this review.

Pricing is as follows-

• For UK and Ireland maps, it's around £60.
• For Europe, around £90.
• For North America, $99.99 USD.

The software comes on a microSD memory card (size dependent on maps bought) with miniSD and standard SD adapters. Quick start manuals are included, but no in depth manual. There is a web address in the quick start manual to a more detailed online version.

The newest version of the software is 4.10.60. The maps I'm using is the City Navigator Europe NT 2008. This takes almost 1.5GB.

For a list of map coverage, see the following link: http://www8.garmin.com/cartography/ontheRoad/

Click through for the complete review... 

Installation

Once you insert the card, Garmin autoruns. That’s about it really, installs as easy as any other sis file, although it takes a bit longer than most.

The UI

There have been a lot of complaints about the UI on Garmin’s mobile XT. I did moan at first, but I have gotten used to it. Once you think about it, it’s a logical layout. Not as good as TomTom, but once familiar, you won’t have any trouble. It’s not nice, but perhaps more importantly, it won’t have you scratching your head wondering where an elusive option is. And best of all, it allows very good control over your data, such as your favourites (sorry – 'My locations'!), routes, contacts etc.

The main screen - 

You can actually select almost everything displayed on here. On selecting the signal bars at the top left, you get the GPS information, such as unit ID, options to disable, etc. You can also select the question mark, which brings up the help menu. The help menu is actually very well done, with almost every aspect covered.

 Then there's the 'Where to' option. 

On selecting this, you are given the many ways of selecting your destination. There's the following:

• Home, rather obviously does a direct route home, assuming you have predefined it already. If not, it will ask you to do so.
• Addresses, which brings up the option which will be most used. It’s here Garmin falls down some. The first option, it asks you which country the address is in. Now this is more annoying than it sounds. For some reason, it often doesn't remember the country you are in, or last used. It is just a matter of putting in a few letters and choosing it from the list, but I find this pointless. There should be an option to have a default country. It’s an unwelcome extra step. After the country has been chosen you can either search by postcode, or by address. It could however, be worded better. To go by address, you have to choose 'Search all cities'. Which then brings you to house number (optional) and then street.
• My Locations, (or favourites, as most people would think of it).

• Recent finds, which is any location you have been to recently.
• Extras, which is any custom POI sets you have installed, and travel guides which you can buy and download from Garmins website.
• Cities, which when selected searches for all nearby (based on current or last known GPS position) towns, cities and villages nearby. Seems to be within an 8 mile radius.
• Intersections, which brings you to the search for an address routine.
• Peerpoints, a function becoming increasingly popular with satnav phones in where it sends a text message to a contact of yours with the same software, and displays where you are on their device. So if someone has text you a peerpoint, it will be in here.
• Position, in which you can enter GPS co-ordinates.

Coming back to the main screen, there's the option to view map. This will go to the GPS position, or if not available, the last known one. All the usual options are there, zoom in, zoom out, scroll the map (which isn't as easy as I’d like) and various options from there. You can click on a point using the cursor and add it to my locations. Which is very much a must for satnav in my opinion. You can also view the trip computer from the map, which gives overall averages, such as speed etc.

Tools
 

Going into the tools menu from the main screen brings up 8 options, all with various submenus. 

Garmin online - gives you access to traffic, weather, hotel rates, fuel prices and safety cameras. It also allows you to see your subscription status. It’s worth noting at this point that although you can buy Garmin camera subscription, you can also use your own POI for speed cameras.

Peerpoints - lists your recent peerpoints. There are a lot of options associated with these, which I'll go into later.

Route details - lists all the instructions you will follow in order (assuming you don’t deviate). Each one has the distance to, and ETA on. If you select any, you see the point on the map where the instruction would come. At any point you can add a 'via' stop-off. That’s to say, you can select a point in your journey where you have to drop by somewhere on the way. Handy.

Browse map. 

Where am I? - obviously dependant on GPS signal, displays the nearest address, current location, and the nearest major intersections.

• Manage my data - Brings up a whole lot of submenus. It’s fairly obvious stuff, so I'll just say what you can edit rather than go into detail.
• My locations - Rename, change location, delete
• Routes – Rename, edit points, change route preference, delete, and create new
• Tracks – Save active, clear active, or edit saved tracks.
• Contacts – Can assign GPS locations to any contact in your phone book.
• Map sets – Able to choose which map set to use if you have more than one.
• Custom POI sets – No options here, just to view them, which is where they are on the memory card, and how much space they use.

Trip computer lists the following:

• Overall Avg
• Driving Avg
• Max Speed
• Total Time
• Driving Time
• Stopped Time
• You can reset these.

Back into the main menu, and we have:

Settings

A huge list of settings, which can go into detail, but I'm a fan of fine tuning things. More options the better, in general. They generally lead to submenus.

Map -

• Map detail, in which you have 5 settings ranging from 'most' to 'least'. Go with whatever you find gives the best performance for your phone, i.e. allows it to move smoothly onscreen while navigating. On my 6110, which has only 17MB of free RAM for running applications, 'normal' runs fine.
• Orientation, offers 3D, North up, and track up options.
• Auto zoom, enabled means it zooms on the map according to your speed. The faster your going, the further out it zooms. A very good idea for phones due to the smaller screen size.
• Vehicle, is an option to change the image of you/your location, which is by default an arrow. You can download news ones, cars as well apparently.
• Dim roads, with the options 'While Routing' and 'Never'. I couldn't see what it did. Supposed to dim roads while giving an instruction?
• Metro areas, enabled or disabled.
• Show location, an interesting menu option. You can choose 'On roads', or 'At GPS location'. So rather than it automatically putting you on the nearest road, it will put you exactly where the GPS says you are.
• Outline detailed maps, yes or no.
• Lat/Lon Grid, enabled or disabled.
• Map features, which bring us into yet another submenu! I'm not going to list these, as its just choosing what label to give things such as cities and POI. None, small, medium, large.

System -

• GPS, here you find options to select either Bluetooth or internal, and to enable or disable either/both.
  
• Distance/Speed, allows you to choose how it’s displayed in either Statute, Metric, or Nautical.
• Direction, displayed in Cardinal Letters, Numeric Degrees, or Mils.
• Elevation, in Statute or Metric.
• Depth, in Statute, Metric or Fathoms (!!).
• Temperature, in Fahrenheit or Celsius.
• Location format, which I am not going to list as there's 33 of them. A few examples are India Zone IVB, MGRS, British Grid and various hddd.ddddd type formats.
• Datum, again lots of these too. There is Ordinance Survey GB, and WGS 72 and WGS 84 among them.

Routing -

• What type of vehicle you use, bike, car, truck, emergency (what difference would that make I wonder?) and a few others, including pedestrian.
• Off route calculation, and some good options here. There is prompted, which mean you have to approve any deviation from the original course. Automatic, announced which will automatically reroute but tell you it’s doing so. Automatic silent, which is obvious, and off, which presumably means no recalculations at all.
• Route preference, of faster time, shorter distance and off road. Needless to say, I haven't tried the off road one.
• Turn preview, which if enabled brings up a still screen of the next turn. In practice this is very annoying, as your not sure what your current position is, which I much prefer to see when about to make a turn.
• Avoidance set-up, gives a nice little list of do's and don’ts. You can tell it to avoid many things, such as carpool lanes, ferries, toll roads, traffic, u-turns and major/minor roads.

Display -

• Backlight override, gives you various options, one of the best is 'On when charging'. Small things like this make a satnav good for me. The other options are Always on, On when navigating, On when speaking, and None.
• Text, allows you to choose from many languages.
• Font size, gives you 5 sizes to choose from.
• Colour mode, Day, Night and the default, Auto.

Audio -

• Volume, which you adjust by 20% each time
• Voice, choose which voice you want for instructions.
• Voice prompt, should you wish to turn off the voice prompts for some reason, you can here.
• Attention tone, which I must admit I don't know what qualifies as an attention tone. The options to disable and enable are here though.

Garmin online access, allows you to allow always, disabled, or prompt for connection. This is for downloading traffic data, speed cameras and checking your Garmin online status.

Proximity points, has the options to enable custom POI sets, Garmin’s own safety camera sets, and adjust the audio notifications for them.

About, contains such information like your IMEI number, IMSI (product ID), Card ID and version number of the software.

Restore Defaults, enough said. It will bring up a confirmation box to ask if you’re really sure.

Location input

As with many other satnavs, Garmin offers various ways of inputting data. I always test using the following addresses, to see how well it fares on finding them. I try by postcode, and then full address. If it gets the full address, I then try shortening it, to see how lazy I can be on inputting addresses.

First address – Which is my new address, a house built less than a year ago in a medium size town. As such, I'm not expecting any satnav to have it in, even if I have the latest maps.

• Result: Postcode – not found.
• Address – gets the right town, but all suggestions are different house numbers.

Second address – Which is my old address, less than 5 minutes away but has had the same postcode and address for many years. This should therefore be on all satnavs with recent maps.

• Result: Postcode – found.
• Address – found.

Third address – An address which is really out in the wilds, but should still be on any decent satnav as it has remained the same for years.

• Result: Postcode – found.
• Address – Failed. I say failed because there is a real problem with the address search. You cannot search for house names, numbers only. This needs to be rectified by Garmin.

Forth – The nearest supermarket.

• Result: Not bad. Got the nearest one, and quite a few others, but not all.

Fifth – The London eye. Not an address input, but more of a landmark search, or POI if it doesn't allow general text input.

• Result: Found, along with phone number. Just had to put 'London eye' into the spell name selection on POI.

Navigation

For navigation, I always use the same settings for whatever satnav package I use. Always the fastest route, and warn, or if not available, avoid tolls. Transport method by car, and all major and minor roads acceptable.

This I feel is the most common settings people use on satnavs, so should give a true indication of how good the navigating is.

Route 1.

[Link to KML file ]

Is a route from my work to home, a short journey of about 10-15 minutes depending on if I catch the traffic or not. It’s a good little test, as there various routes to take, although I know clearly which is the best so it’s a good comparison to see how well it compares with local knowledge. 

It starts off well, but after a while sends me down an extremely narrow road. A rather scary drive ensues, even with my small car. However it soon gets me back onto the main road and I'm off on my way. The rest of the route follows the way I normally go.

A few notes about this journey. The small lane it sent me down was not really appropriate, but then distance wise it obviously thought it was the fastest route. Its part of the reason I chose this route, to see if it uses roads like that.

Another small note is that turning into Nailsworth didn’t give any instruction, the next one being to turn left (for the upcoming mini roundabout) rather than right onto the road I was facing. This is common with a number of satnavs I use, so it’s most likely a map issue rather than fault of the software.

So, for that journey, not bad but a bit concerning about the very narrow road taken. Time taken was around 16 minutes.

Route 2.

[Link to KML file]

This route goes from my home to an address in my old home town. It’s not long, around 15-20 minutes drive in rural areas. Shouldn't be any deviation from my usual route.

And I don't have much to say about this at all. It followed exactly the route I would have taken naturally, and there was nothing bad about it. Was pretty much flawless. One small thing to note was that it didn't take me down a narrow road in my starting town, which some other satnavs do. It took me right down the hill, and then onto a main road which was definitely the faster way.

Time taken was around 15 minutes.

Route 3.

[Link to KML file]

This route goes from my home to a rural address in Wales, around an hour’s trip. It’s a very good test to do, as there are 2 main routes, one over the second Severn crossing which has a toll, and the other through Gloucester which in itself should give an interesting insight in the routing.

The navigation was flawless for this route. It certainly selected the best route possible (avoiding the Severn bridge toll) and didn't give me any problems whatsoever.

Plenty of warnings for motorway turnoffs, and I don't have a single complaint of the whole journey. I got to see the Garmin speed cameras on this trip. While they work ok, it would have been better if they gave a distance, rather than just a warning that you’re in a speed camera zone.

Worth noting that it bypassed Ross-On-Wye, even though it would have been a shorter distance to go through. Definitely a correct choice as it saved time.

Instructions

Not wonderful. The instructions themselves are not too bad, but the timing is often too slow. Oddly, despite the huge range of options and settings Garmin XT gives you, changing the distance for voice instructions is not one of them. In some instances, I would have missed a turning had I not glanced at the screen. Not what you want to do when in busy traffic in a town centre.

Apart from the timing issue, it’s a satisfactory fare. The volume was loud enough for me on 80%. At 100% it would be loud enough to be heard over most music, or the window down. 

Navigation in general

All in all – good. I would certainly trust it (as much as you can trust a satnav) and currently Garmin is my satnav of choice out of copilot, Navigon, Navicore, and Nokia's maps. No satnav is infallible, and of course it makes some mistakes and there are some instances that make you ask it what the hell it’s doing. But Id happily let it plan a trip and follow it.

It’s worth saying here that previously I used older maps. These had some sort of issue with roundabouts in the UK. So if you do go to buy a copy of Garmin, make sure it’s the latest maps included. The difference is huge.

Navigation display

Display is reasonable, night colours and day clear enough to navigate by with giving any problems.  The data onscreen gives you the distance to the next instruction, the next instruction, your speed, and estimated arrival time.  It’s OK, but I am surprised at there isn't any option to change this layout. Personally, I’d like a satellite signal strength bar, and a battery bar on there. There's room on the bottom bar.

Features

• Custom POI are an option, many people will be relieved to hear. They do however have to go through a POI loader downloaded from the Garmin website. I've had mixed results with this. Every time I load a new set of POI, it wipes any I had on there previously. Certainly not ideal. The POI file types are CSV and GPX.

• Peer points. These are Garmin’s answer to friend finder type functions the other satnavs have. Someone with the same version of Garmin can send and receive peerpoints. Simply, someone with Garmin XT can send their location to someone else with Garmin XT, savable as a location or to navigate to right away. And it’s free apart from the SMS cost. I tried it with a friend. It’s easy enough to send, simply go into peerpoints and send, which you search through your contacts, and boom, text sent. Clever thing is, when you receive one, it tells you it’s a peerpoint and asks you if you want to start Garmin. When in Garmin, you can either start navigating to that point, see it on the map, or go to options and save it in my locations.

• Traffic for Garmin is free. Apart from data charges of course. Depending on your settings, it can check at the start of each journey. I didn't encounter enough traffic to warrant an opinion on how good it was. 
• Garmin also do their own speed cams, downloadable over the air. I did this and got an unexpected 30 day trial. Otherwise you have to create an account at my.garmin.com and pay. However after checking, its an expensive £29.99 per year for the UK, though it varies depending on region. It would be far better to sign up to pocketGPSworld or the like.

Plus points of the software

• Settings, there's lots of them. I also really like the peerpoint function, I think functions like this will become much more prevalent now that GPS enabled phones are soon to be reaching the mid range level, think Nokia 6220 classic and 6210 navigator. Both set to be reasonably priced phones, rather than N series higher priced phones for enthusiasts.
• Best thing however, is that it succeeds on your basic navigation. Just, due to the late instructions. This should be rectified by Garmin, a speed based time to instructions would be much better I feel. For motorway driving, Garmin seems to rule the roost for now.
• The ETA has been extremely accurate. Scarily so. On several long journeys it hasn't been more than 9 minutes out. A pretty impressive feat.

Bad points

• The main issue which is going to put most people off is that it’s locked to the memory card it comes on. This is a very bad idea, as it means you either have to put up with very little space (less than 200mb when you get the UK maps, as it’s a 512mb card), or take an extra memory card around with you. Technically, this means you cannot use Garmin XT on a Nokia N95 8GB, as it doesn't have a card slot. Make a form of online activation, lock it to IMEI. Quite apart from the N95 8GB users, I'm sure having it locked to one card puts off many others as well. Although a plus point of it being locked to card rather than phone is that you can easily change it to another phone if need be.
• The address method of input needs improving as said. 
• Late instructions, as mentioned. This seems to affect navigation in urban areas rather than motorways.
• A bug, which affects the edit key when doing an SMS. It’s a bit random, but it’s definitely down to the Garmin software. Often the key just doesn't work.

Overall impression, value for money, usability

Aside from the locked card issue, I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a solid satnav program. A novice might get a bit confused with all the options, but the defaults are all sensible, as are the menu layouts. It will also satisfy most advanced satnav users, with options to tweak almost everything.

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written by ralph, April 02, 2008

Execlent review , don't disagree with any points in fact I learnt a few !

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Garmin? Nav4all!
written by DrBoB, April 20, 2008

Nav4All is a free navigator for car, bike and foot travellers.
The license is free untill 2010!
In comparative test it showed to be better than the TomTom navigator series
www.nav4all.nl

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Nav4all? Doubtful.
written by bartmanekul, April 21, 2008

I have not tried nav4all yet, but thats because its an over the air product. Maps are downloaded over the air, so anyone without a good data package is going to be charged a lot of money.

Also, the site does not inspire confidance.

Its partially in English and Dutch (on the same pages), they only have 1 overpriced GPS reciever thats out of stock, and as for that 'test'...


Its funny that both the nav4all domain and the domain where the tests are held are both owned by: Verio Inc. - Growing Your Business, One Click At A Time

So Nav4all conducted some very shabby tests of their own. This posting has convinced me to avoid nav4all for a very long time.

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written by PseudoFinn, April 21, 2008

I agree with you, Luke. I gave Nav4all about a 15 minute run- that was all I needed to see.

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written by serdar yildirim, April 29, 2008

hello i want this programm please for my nokia

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