Navman MY85XLT GPS review
My family must be one of the few families in Australia that does not have a GPS in in our car. I suspect this is because I’m an old fogey and we don’t tend to stray too far from the nest. However, when given the chance to review a Navman MY85XLT GPS, I was interested in finding out what the fuss was about. Here’s the really funny thing: while I struggled with the touchscreen, my five-year-old daughter had it working within minutes. I like to think that’s because my daughter uses iPads at school, and no, she does not drive.
Being an old fogey it took me a while to work out that in order to get a GPS signal, I needed to face the screen of the GPS at the sky, without anything impinging its line of sight to the sky. Also loading Australian maps, New Zealand maps were default, proved to be rather useful.
Once set up, the Navman worked really well. Normally I don’t like being told where to go, but in this instance I made an exception, and it was nice arriving at the place we wanted to go instead of finding ourselves in the middle of Sydney city, completely locked in by one-way signs and road closures. Using its ‘Smart Route Feature’ the Navman can plan the best possible route taking into account historic traffic information.
In addition to telling people where to go, the MY85XLT offers a host of other functions, such as fatigue warning and landmark guidance. While playing with the point of interest function I was surprised to find that there was an ATM 400m from where we live that I had somehow not noticed in the past five years. Clearly that’s more evidence that I’m an old fogey.
Key special specs include:
LCD size: 4.7 inches
Screen resolution: 480 x 272
LCD panel ( 5 inches (resistive)
The estimated retail price is $AUS349
Memory: 2 GB
RAM: 128 MB
September 26th, 2011
As every smartphone has GPS build-in and Google maps are free, I don’t see the need for a GPS device.
October 8th, 2011
I don’t see the need for a GPS device.
March 23rd, 2012
It runs much too slow. I find during all aspects of using it, for example after pressing a button the lag affect makes you wonder if you did actually press it at all. Sometimes you need to press it fairly hard to get a reaction. I came from an older Garmin, didn’t have all these features but smoother to use.