When the first Bluetooth GPS receiver came out, honestly I thought that was something I didn’t need. Actually, I’m not one of those drivers who spends a lot of time talking on the phone. Later when I upgraded my GPS to a unit that had Bluetooth, I loved being able to talk “hands-free” so much I would never consider buying a unit without that capability.
Buying a GPS is sometimes difficult because there are so many manufacturers and they have so many products to choose from. If you’re focusing on a GPS that has Bluetooth, then you’re narrowing the field down some, but still, you have a ton of possibilities.
In this article I’m going to make the choice of the right Bluetooth GPS a little (how about a lot?) easier for you. Once you finish reading this, you’ll be ready to purchase the right unit for your needs and your budget.
One thing that helped me when I bought my unit was realizing there are three main manufacturers of GPS devices. Garmin is the industry leader with probably 70% of the market share. Tom Tom is fast catching up with great products and great prices. And Magellan certainly holds its own as one of the early pioneers with a lot of proprietary features.
I’m not going to tell you which unit I chose. I will tell you it was made by one of these three.
Let’s talk about each of these companies and their GPS’s that have Bluetooth capability.
Garmin
Garmin has a huge range of products. They have several GPS devices that have Bluetooth integration. Personally, I like their newer, sleeker nuvi line. The nuvis are replacing the StreetPilot as Garmin’s flagship line of GPS receivers.
There are several nuvis with Bluetooth. Their numbers are the 360, 370, 660, 670, 680, 760, 770, 780, and the recent arrivals the 880 and the 5000.
The 300s all have the smaller 3.5-inch screens. The main difference between the 300s and the 600s is the screen size. If you want a huge screen, try the 5000! It’s screen is a huge 5.2-inches along the diagonal.
The 600s also have what’s called FM transmission capability. That is, the sound from the GPS is routed through your car’s stereo system.
What the 700s offer above the 300s and the 600s is multi-destination routing. In other words, if you want to drive from New York to Calgary to Vancouver to San Francisco, you can enter all that information in your GPS at one time and it will calculate the best route to get you to all three places. (Unfortunately, it can’t make the drive shorter!)
Nuvis currently run from right around $200 for the 300s to $350 or so for the 700s. The 5000 is currently around $650, and the 880 runs about $1,000.
Magellan
I absolutely adore Magellan’s Maestro line! In that line, there are two GPS’s that support Bluetooth, the 3250 and the 4250. They are the same, except the 4250 has the larger 4.3-inch screen.
These devices are comparable to the Garmin nuvis. Magellan does have a proprietary thing with AAA, where they offer their Tour Book actually on the device. (You have to be a AAA member to access it.)
At the moment, the 3250 will set you back about $200. Believe me, that’s a lot of GPS for that amount of money. And the 4250 is about $250.
Tom Tom
Tom Tom is the newer kid on the block. And they have been aggressively gaining market share with great products and very aggressive pricing. The Tom Tom Go line supports Bluetooth. The Go 510 runs slightly less than $200 and the Go 920 runs between $300 and $350.
Unfortunately, no six hundred word article can tell you all you need to know about these great devices, even if you narrow it down to just the ones with Bluetooth. What you need to do now, is to get on an informative website where you can actually look at specific models and check their current prices.
By: Rick Cole
Posts Tagged ‘Bluetooth Gps Receiver’
How to Choose the Right Bluetooth GPS Receiver
February 9th, 2010Bluetooth GPS Vs CF GPS
November 3rd, 2009
For some people there is a debate over which to choose a Bluetooth GPS receiver or a compact flash GPS receiver. I have used both so I am writing from experience. There seem to be quite a few advantages a Bluetooth GPS receiver has over a cf GPS receiver.
The main advantage would be versatility, you can use a Bluetooth GPS receiver with a Bluetooth PDA as well as a compatible Bluetooth mobile phone whereas with a cf GPS receiver you are limited to only a compatible PDA as mobile phones usually don’t have a cf slot.
Another advantage is with regards to battery life, some Bluetooth GPS receivers have exceptional battery life lasting up to 26 hours, some mobile phones also have a long life, although a PDA won’t last anywhere near that, when using a cf GPS receiver the PDA battery is usually depleted faster as the it has to also power the cf receiver since the cf receiver can’t work on its own
The third consideration is convenience, one can find some new GPS receivers that are extremely small, the Holux GPSlim 236 comes to mind, because of their size and sensitivity you can stick them in your pocket and still get a very good signal so you don’t have anything sticking out of the PDA as is the case with a cf GPS receiver.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of newer PDAs seem to be loosing the compact flash interface, a good example is the Fujitsu Siemens Loox 720, it has being rumoured that the Loox 720 replacement won’t be including a cf interface. My conclusion would be it seems that manufacturers don’t consider the cf interface that important to include in newer PDAs, kind of like being phased out so it might not be a good idea to invest in cf devices
My final argument would be that when it comes to using a GPS receiver for driving, it is easier to position a Bluetooth GPS receiver in a convenient position where it can receive a better signal than with a cf GPS receiver because since the cf GPS receiver is fixed to the PDA, you are limited by how much you can move the PDA around and still have a good view of the PDA screen.
Based on all these facts I would consider a Bluetooth GPS receiver a better choice to a cf GPS receiver.
By: Francis Ononye
