What would you like to see integrated into a GPS in 2012?

1. Next street up on the green bar.
2. A switch to turn off road lock.

I must say, that was one thing that was nice to have, THe street your driving up to. I know the street I am on, With the current feature, you still have to look at the street signs to see whet street is next.

I would like to be able to customize a personalized menu. Sometimes while driving I have to go two or three menu levels deep to get to a setting. I would like the map view to have a Personal Menu option that contains a manu of my choosing.

Weather and weather alerts.

I would like to see the street name coming up as well. My wife's older Garmin does this, however my new one doesn't. I also would like to see better traffic intregation. My unit doesn't provide accurate enough traffic information to be considered reliable.....

The profile shows you own an obsolete c340, get a newer unit like the 2460 that has customizable main menu.

Garmin just reports what it receives, it doesn't generate the information.

I still wish they had a "Meet Me Halfway" feature. That way you could enter Point A and Point B and then search for say a restaurant, gas station, etc. at a mid-point between those two coordinates!

FWIW, that is the standard display on the TomTom units when you are in 3D display mode. In 2D display mode, my experience has been that it does not display the next street at any zoom level that I find useful for driving.

I'm not familiar with the Garmin units. Is there any chance with them of behavior similar to the TomTom units?

With best wishes,
- Tom -

I have all the counties by name in Illinois & other states in my custom POI. The file gives me the general direction of the nearby county seats.

When going down the highway I would like to be able to push a button and see the next several towns down the road. Distance to and ETA.

Most new cars have some kind of video screen installed in the dash. It is usually for displaying information for the audio system. Aftermarket dash radios offer LCD screens to display album covers from MP3 players or to play back DVDs (only when the vehicle is not moving).
I would like a plain 5" or 7" color LCD that can either display the usual audio information, or can accept video output from my laptop - my preferred way of GPS navigation when I go on roadtrips. This way the laptop could be put in an out-of-the-way location, and feed its screen display to the one in the dashboard. This would also be less attractive to thieves, as opposed to free-standing GPS units. This would not be much more expensive than what car manufacturers are already providing.
As far as NOAA weather warnings, it is now possible to buy an emergency NOAA weather radio & program it with your location - then the radio will only give alarms and warnings that apply to your exact neighborhood and NOT the other parts of your region. I bought this kind of unit at Wally World last year & have been pleased to hear its alarm go off for severe T'storms, flooding & whatever. I was concerned I could sleep through a tornado warning & awaken to find my house collapsing around me.
The problem with NOAA weather radios on the road is that you are in a strange area. Even if you have the weather radio on all the time, you may not have the correct channel for the area you are in. I am able to receive 4 different NOAA weather channels at my home, only 1 of those channels applies to me, and even then not all of its warnings do apply to me.
How about a weather radio built into your car's radio system, combined with a GPS receiver that tells the weather radio where it is, so that the radio will only give alarms appropriate to wherever you and your car are at the moment. This is doable with present technology.
At the moment, it is very difficult to buy a car radio that can receive the weather bands.

My Nuvi 2455 can emit an audible speed alert along with the visual speed alert. But we have to set the unit to be a european country, I have set mine to the United Kingdom, I haven't notice much of a change apart from the speed indicator, everything else I'm able to change to local settings.

See http://www.garmin.com/uk/support/faqs/

Not a whiz-bang feature, and probably not one that many consumers would ask for.

But I think it's very important, and will become more important over the next few years, even in consumer - car - handheld devices.

RAIM - Receiver autonomous integrity monitoring.

One way to think of it is a way for a GPS receiver to notice and tell you if things are starting to smell bad.

Maybe it's a misbehaving sat signal -- could be too much multipath, or a bad bird.

Or, it could be jamming or spoofing.

A few weeks ago some folks in Texas got some GPS-guided drones to crash by feeding them locally generated bogus GPS signals. (Essentially they convinced the drone's GPS that it was at too high an altitude -- it corrected back down to the "proper" altitude, crashing the vehicle into the ground.)

As well as telling me where I am, how fast I'm going, and when I'll get to my destination, I'd really like it if my GPS receiver could also sit up and tell me that something is wrong and don't believe anything it's telling me!

Already exists for aircraft GPS. It would be nice to see it moved into consumer-prosumer gear. I'd be much more interested in that, than in something like "3D lane-spotting technology."

Too much for Garmin! If Garmin had sold us GPS-guided drones they would have all crashed with firmware v 5.30!

dobs108

Don't know if this has been mentioned yet or not but I would like to see Live Map Updating along with firmware updates that can be turned on/off if the user decides to update the firmware at his leisure. This can be done through the satellite. Also, a decent traffic receiver that doesn't cost an arm and a leg that always gives accurate information. Put back the mp3 player in the new Zumo. A lot of us bikers were dependent on this for our music.

Interestingly, there is already some demonstration that this can work--not just with amateur radio APRS systems, but at least one higher-end scanner radio (the Uniden HomePatrol-1) DOES have an optional GPS unit or plugin that can program frequencies for an area based on GPS fix. (I would honestly expect both Uniden and GRE--the other "biggie" in the consumer scanner field--to pick up on this more.)

As prices for GPS chips come down, I do look to start seeing this in weather radios--IMHO, though, you're probably going to see a weather radio with either integrated GPS or some way to connect to a GPS receiver (a la the HomePatrol-1) before you see a GPS unit with an integrated weather radio.

(That said...I think you may have given me an interesting homebrew project! You can get cheapie GPS chips at Sparkfun, SDR chips and radio designs that could cover the NOAA weather radio bands are becoming affordable, and the biggie would just be creating an internal database as to boundaries of FIPS codes per county and known frequencies...)

We got one of these. Wakes us up in the middle of the night sometimes. Still worth it.

I have a 2595. I would like it to give the double "ding" alert just before you come to the street/turn you're supposed to take. The factory NAV system in my Lincoln does this and it's a great feature. When you hear that signal you're just about at the turn and you never miss it.

Also comparing the two systems, the Garmin voices have LONG way to go to match those in the Lincoln. There's only one voice, but it's a nice female voice that sounds like a real person on the standard instructions: inflection, tone, polite and friendly sounding. All nearly perfect. I can't imagine wanting to switch it to any other voice. I guess that's what you get when you shell out $2000 bucks. It's a little off on some of the street pronunciations, but that's to be expected and it's still better than the Garmin.

I brought that up once and I thought someone posted that all of the models ending in zero showed the street name you're approaching.

I once said if Garmin would put all of the features back in a model that my 2820 had with voice command added, and a Nuvi screen they would have a perfect GPS

I notice with the united kingdom have the speed alert and also the traffic alerts comes up different, it warns that the road narrows, that there is road works ahead on the screen. I thought I was seeing things so I changed it back to NZ and drove the same road and the alerts were gone.

So why would Garmin give some features to one country and not another, seems a bit silly to me, if the features are there why not give them to all with the ability to turn them on or off?

If you have the 2460, it has the next street coming up, on the green bar.

If they made the perfect GPS with all the features you would want, we would all buy one and use it for years, and never purchase another. It happened with the nuvi 760. It is a decision of marketing to never make the perfect GPS.

dobs108

Am I driving into a tornado watch box? In winter where exactly is the freezing precipitation line (given the programed route)? I might want to layup over night at that motel rather than push on into that mountain range.

Is this type of information available from NOAA directly from sat reception, or must this be via a subscription only? If so, then it really isn't useful when you are out of WiFi & commercial radio range (when/where you need it the most).

Plenty of financial incentive here for Garmin to get this right. Now a Nuvi becomes a compelling daily commuting instrument & not just an occasional special occasion navi.

Seems you discovered how to turn on and off a few features. I wonder what countries support what features?

I would like to see the ability to not only create POIs, alerts, etc., but also be able to put at least one shortcut on the map. Such as one touch button to the Rest Stops POI, for example.