Garmin NÜVI 200

Author's product rating:   

Reliability	Excellent
Ease of Use	Very Easy
Look & Feel	Excellent
Battery life	Good
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	price, maps, points of interest, speed camera warnings
Disadvantages:	extra maps/updates pricy

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Just prior to going on holiday this year we decided to treat ourselves to a SatNav. Most of the bells & whistles the more pricy units have wasn't of interest to us, we just wanted something basic. My wife had used a TomTom in someone else's car so we wandered down to Halfords with something similar in mind.

Having spent half an hour perusing about 20 different units none of which stood out, we grabbed a passing salesbod and asked for help. He immedietly pointed to the Garmin and rattled off a dozen reasons why, most of which blurred into a realisation that the stickers that showed the features on each unit were lying i.e. he said it had post code navigation, the stickers said not. Anyway, time was moving on so we grabbed one and paid the £165 it cost at the time.

Having got home, the first thing I did was go online and check other reviews to see if we'd screwed up. Happily not, all were very positive with most saying 'best unit in that price range bar none'. Good. So, what do we have?

Like most similar units, it comes bundled with a power lead and suction cup for attaching it to the windscreen plus another ring to help fix it to the dashboard but I can't imagine it would work with many unless they had the right shape. A short manual gets you up to speed.

The units is very compact and fairly thin and has no auxiliary aerial. That combined with a 3 hour battery life means you can also carry it around in a pocket for navigating on foot or a bike, if needed. Handy. It was installed in seconds and fired up. After a few seconds, it found our location and was ready to go.

You can enter a location by name or postcode. Everything is done via the touch screen and Garmin's long heritage in the GPS field showed as the whole interface design is easy to follow even without consulting the manual. As this is my first GPS, it must be easy to use!

It has a single female voice and a decent (adjustable) volume level. Various points on the screen such as the bottom left hand and right hand side bring up extra screens and information. The update rate of the 3.5 inch screen is fine and you can zoom in and out easily. I found it easy to follow the instructions but you do need to glance at it sometimes as it doesn have one odd foible, a road with no junctions but a slight kink often causes the device to say 'turn right' then 'turn left'.

I'm told the map quality on these is better than most and I have no evidence to the contrary - everywhere we went was as it claimed (we did 1000+ miles that week).

Extras include points of interest so you can quickly see where the nearest food (choose your preferred type too), ATM, hotel, parks, civic facilities and so on are to be found. The hotel function was a godsend at the end of the day when we needed an overnight stay somewhere.

It has automatic rerouting so if you take a wrong turning it quickly works out what to do and issues the updated instructions. It also avoided taking us down one way streets but one rural road turned out to be closed to traffic due to an unsafe bridge but looking at the gate, this was a fairly recent event so the unit is forgiven.

Also useful is the downloadable speed camera list complete with 90 days free updates. After that they are available at a cost which I felt was too high so probably won't bother with. You can also download updated firmware (the operating software) and copy it over via a USB lead (not, alas, supplied)

The maps are UK & Ireland only - if you want Europe, buy the next model up as that is far cheaper than buying them afterwards. If you do want extra maps, they can be downloaded with it attached to your PC and other software/maps can be introduced via Secure Digital flash memory cards.

It also has a few odd functions like weight/temperature/currency conversion and you can load and view jpg images if desired. There's also a calculator.

Overall, a very nice unit which I'm very pleased I bought. I had no need for voice control, Bluetooth etc so for the price, it does exactly what I needed and does it well.