Garmin Nuvi / Tomtom

Hi all you who know about these things. We were desperate to buy a SAT NAV when we were in Italy recently, the only one we could get in the city of Spoleto was a Nuvi 200w. I wanted a Tomtom but they were not coming in until later in the week. Anyway, can someone comment on the merits of one type verses another.

I am presently looking at buying more SD card maps for it.

to be honest the 200w is one of the best units garmin have produced, not so much for features, but ease of use, reliability and what you get for your money.
the tomtom comparible is the tomtom one xl which although looks totally different, essentially it does the same things.

i think the only thing that the 200w is missing that it needs is a bluetooth hands free, (but i ight be wrong)

Yeah, the 200W doesn't have a bluetooth, but when I bought mine I didn't want it WITH bluetooth because the 100HP already has it built in

i have the nuvi 310 deluexe and its ace.

i tried the tomtom but didnt like its maps so didnt buy it. i love my nuvi though (like my car).

im yet to use the bluetooth calling, but will eventually

Thanks people

I don't need Bluetooth either, I have one for my phone so all good. Yes I found the 200w easy to use but I have nothing to compare it with.

The nuvi 200w is an awesome unit, i bought one after having no end of problems with the tomtom satnavs. The 3D map is much more useful than the tomtom, there seems to be some distortion to fit more on the display which works really well, the colours are vibrant and the night maps with better contrast are also much easer to view than tomtom ones.

I loaned my bro' s Garmin the weekend having flogged my TomTom one V3 a week ago. It was awful. Missed three turnings at roundabouts as it was desperately slow to redraw my position relative to the turn-off. Not sure what version though, no bells & whistles; very compact but wasted lots of time turning around. My TomTom was much faster in letting me know where I was at that moment in time.

Following this thread http://www.fiatforum.com/satellite-n...confusion.html I've just ordered the Garmin 200W for £142 from Amazon. Although we may go to visit friends in France next year, that's likely to be the extent of my European driving in the foreseeable future, so I decided that if I wanted France I could always add it later (I hope?). Just hope it's as good as it's cracked up to be for the UK. Will be useful for finding homes when I rescue and rehome labradors and check out new homes (doing 2 tomorrow with the aid of Streetmap.co.uk which is much better than Multimap BTW).

isn't it just £10 more for the european maps version on amazon? you'll be paying a lot more than that for a later upgrade...

Exactly, the 250W is now priced at £149.16, compared to 200W at £142

Yeah, I saw that, but for some reason the 250W had crap reviews compared to the 200W and as I wasn't fussed about Europe (except for just 1 France trip maybe) I bottled it and saved my 8 squids to spend on wine and loose women.

cant comment on the garmin, but a huge thumbs up for a tomtom 520, I have been all over the place, including villages that are literally a few houses on a country lane, never let me down once, and it is very very responsive in use. A friend has a mio c710 (think it's been superceded now) and that is almost on a par with tomtom for navigatio, though it's not quite as responsive (screen map always seemsa couple of seconds behing your actual driving, but you get used to it, but it's points of interest are far superior to the tomtom

i sided with the garmin because i didnt like the feel or maps on the tomtom

plus using a garmin with work i was familiar with it already

but i got a better version with bluetooth and picture viewer etc

garmin all the way over tom tom. the experience, mapping and software of garmin are alot better than tom tom. the 200W is a nice unit too. garmins technical support is brilliant too, if you have any queries ring them up and there tech guys are the best ive ever spoke to.

we have the garmin at work that is the largeish model (i cant remember what it is), but its the one that is quite thinck.

it goes in all manner of cars, and vans, and even gets dropped the occasional time, yet it refuses to give up

i got the garmin 310D just because i got given the money to buy it so got the best one i could

I am yet to use the bluetooth on it, but i am going to put a few of my pics on it