John Boal's Blog
random thoughts and bleary eyes
Thursday, August 06, 2009
New Garmin Nuvi 885T GPS
Garmin in their infinite wisdom decided that it probably would be better not to send me a replacement unit that might also brick itself so they sent me the 885T which is a much better unit I think. More expensive too I imagine. So I gave them my credit card so they could cross-ship. I had sent the old unit back after I got the new one, only to have them send the old one back "repaired" a few weeks later. So I guess it's merry Christmas for me then... I get the new unit AND the old one back too. Good work Garmin. At least they get a good customer service score.
The one nice feature that the 885T has which the 765T doesn't is a removable battery. If the 765 had a removable battery, I could have taken it out and rebooted the unit (maybe).
The one great feature about the 885T is that it comes with the MSN Direct traffic receiver (in the 12V power cord). Well, since I don't feel like paying for MSN Direct service, AND I already seemed to have a GTM 20 FM traffic receiver... I plugged the GTM20 into the 885T and Voila! Traffic alerts. Now, with NO ADVERTISING!!! The 885T doesn't expect to be coupled with the GTM 20, but when it is, it still works fine. So I am a happy camper again - free lifetime traffic with NO ADS.
The GPS itself seems to function fine. Sometimes the voice seems to halt or stutter as the GPS's CPU tries to keep up with whatever it's doing in the background. Not a big deal, as the voice guidance is still understandable. Lane assist and the other features are nice. The one difference is this unit takes only a Micro-SD card rather than a full SD card. So I had to order another 2G card for $6 so I could have some tunes on a removable card. No biggie. The music player is the same as the other Nuvi versions (sucky UI) but it works.
The 885T "claims" to be able to render video on the unit from an analog input from a backup camera, but am not sure about this, or if it was meant for the US market. Boy that would be nice though to be able to use it as a little video display. Maybe someone will figure it out some day and let me know...
Thursday, August 06, 2009 8:45:30 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Comments [0]
-
Trackback
GPS
Comments are closed.
Navigation
My LinkedIn Profile
My Facebook Profile
My Plaxo Profile
Bits 'n Widgets - practical approaches to Agile with Scrum and XP
Agile Beer Users Group
Test Driven Developer
John Boal's Resume
JEBoal's seldom updated photos on Flikr
Categories
Agile
Annoyances
Computer
Droid
Facebook
Food
GPS
HAM radio
Home
Owl
random
robots
Scrum
Seattle
Spam
TDD
Treehouse
Vacation
Weather
Web
Tags
Agile (2)
Annoyances (3)
Computer (4)
Droid (2)
Facebook (2)
Food (7)
GPS (2)
HAM radio (4)
Home (10)
Owl (5)
random (1)
robots (1)
Scrum (1)
Seattle (3)
Spam (1)
TDD (2)
Treehouse (7)
Vacation (6)
Weather (8)
Web (3)
<
September 2010
>
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
29
30
31
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Blogroll
#2782
Ade Miller's Tech Blog
Agile Development
Mitch Lacey's Agile Development Blog
Espresso Fueled Agile Development
Mike Puleio's Blog
Geek Noise
Noise de Peter Provost
About the Author
© Copyright 2010
John E. Boal
Sign In
Statistics
Total Posts: 89
This Year: 0
This Month: 0
This Week: 0
Comments: 21
All Content © 2010, John E. Boal