New toy - GPS

Last Friday I bought myself a car navigation GPS (as opposed to a GPS that works off-road). It was a Garvin Unit, really neat, but it only lasted 2 days, then it went dead, and couldn't be turned on whatever what tried.

So they replaced it (they being 'Dick Smith') - assuring me they were usually very stable (although my first unit turned out to be a replacement they'd already got for some bad stock.)

That unit lasted about 18 hours, exactly the same problem.

After returning my 3rd one they’ve told me they are returning all their stock – think it must be a bad batch. They work for about 3 hours, then refuse to turn on.

Coincidentally a guy on the 4wd trip had just bought a top of range hand held garvin, which also died whilst we were camping – he was pretty pissed.

So after three units failed in less than a week, I decided I'd change model, this time I got a TomTom 710, which so far has kept working.

Compared to the garvin, it’s a lot more pocket-pc like (it even has a hour-glass when it’s waiting) – the screen is bigger, but font size is smaller, and thus not as easy to read. The garvin didn’t have nearly as many features, but that made it very easy to use.

The tomtom does at least support gps coordinates, so it's not limited to on road, although once you are off road, theirs no mapping / tracking to help.

For off road, I've bought a Compact-Flash gps which came a couple of days ago. This plugs into my ipaq, and I've got some software and maps which cover most of australia in detail.