garmin versus other GPS vendors - spoken street names
 16 years
|
Generally I am pleased with the performance of my Garmin Nuvi 775T and 1260T GPS units, although, besides some lingering firmware bugs, the single issue I find most annoying is how the units speak street names (presumably based on map data as provided by Navteq). They speak street names that apparently tie to legal addresses rather than highway markers. For example (made up for illustration), the unit might say "take second left to Oldstone Road". The problem is more often than not there are no prominent signs for "Oldstone Road". If my destination is not an address on "Oldstone Road" - I don't care that's what it's known as locally, I just care what the highway designation is as posted on prominent road signs - e.g. State Highway 12, U.S. 59, etc. Granted, the route marking on the screen should tell me where to go in any case, but I usually want to visually verify where the GPS tells me to go with the actual highway signs, e.g. the intersection for "Highway 12".
Although I presume there is nothing I can do to change this on my Garmin units, I was wondering if this issue exists on other major GPS vendors - e.g. TomTom, Magellan - or whether they actually show and speak posted highway designations as I discussed. I would surmise that if Navteq is the map vendor, then it wouldn't matter who the GPS vendor is, but I could be wrong.
TomTom
TomTom models I have used all do a better job than the Nuvi's at speaking Highway numbers. The options available on the TomTom allow you to actually vary what is announced. Using your example my current TomTom 540s would say "turn left on Oldstone Road Highway 12 Highway 59" if Oldstone Road was actually also Hwy 12 and Hwy 59 of course
Nuvi 350, 760, 1695LM, 3790LMT, 2460LMT, 3597LMTHD, DriveLuxe 50LMTHD, DriveSmart 61, Garmin Drive 52, Garmin Backup Camera 40 and TomTom XXL540s.
That's awesome
TomTom models I have used all do a better job than the Nuvi's at speaking Highway numbers. The options available on the TomTom allow you to actually vary what is announced. Using your example my current TomTom 540s would say "turn left on Oldstone Road Highway 12 Highway 59" if Oldstone Road was actually also Hwy 12 and Hwy 59 of course
Wow - that's awesome. My Garmins pick one or the other, but never both. What is even more confusing at times is the map shows a route number, but it speaks a street name. Or vice-versa. Usually, the green bar at the top shows both the route and name, though.
What makes it even worse is
What makes it even worse is when you know the common name of a road and try to use that as an address but the GPSr only knows the official road designation (like CR 121) or visa-versa.
Maps -> Wife -> Garmin 12XL -> StreetPilot 2610 -> Nuvi 660 (blown speaker) -> Nuvi 3790LMT
Nmae change, kind of
A major highway by me had been called the "Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway" since it was built back when dirt was invented. A few years ago, the powers that be dropped that name because it never went into Oyster Bay. It's now just called the "135" which is it's state name. The nuvi still calls it the "SOB", which is our local nickname for that piece of pavement... There are no longer any signs that bear that name, just a memory, except for my new nuvi... If you just started driving and have one of these, boy I can see the confusion...
Striving to make the NYC Metro area project the best.
Nuvi voices do need some work...
I was wondering the same thing, too. Overall, the Garmin does a decent job pronoucing most roads, but a few of them leave me scratching my head. I live in Ohio and many roads are listed as "OH 151" or some other number. The Garmin always pronounces the "OH" instead of calling it "Ohio" which gets pretty annoying.
Another example happened when I was on vacation and programmed the Garmin to navigate to a beach, which was located on a peninsula. The abreviation on the GPS for peninsula was "PA", so when I arrived at the beach, the Garmin informed me that I had arrived at "Pennsylvania".
Now why wouldn't it know that "OH" was Ohio but it assumed that "PA" was Pennsylvania?
street names
looks like I might have to switch from garmin to tom tom, here is Utah a lot of the streets have dual names like 2000 south/antelope drive so the way tom tom speaks the name would really work well.