I bought my GPS V based entirely on a discussion on this forum back in 2002. I paid $500 for the non-deluxe version (only one map region), and then later upgraded to a newer, full US version of City Select. I really loved my GPS V until it died a premature death six months ago due to a rechargeable battery exploding inside. I'm still trying to figure out how to convince the battery manufacturer to pay for a new one...

Anyway, let me list some of the things I liked and disliked about the GPS V.

Likes:
-The overall size and form factor. It was just right for my three uses which were car navigation, handheld use, and motorcycle use. I think the key here was the fact it could do landscape or portrait.

-Rugged. Up until the battery incident, it did kind of get banged around a lot, and I never even flinched when it got dropped.

-Auto-routing. I wouldn't even consider a GPSr that didn't automatically create a route to a given address.

-All the things you said about eta and speed displays and things like that.

Dislikes:
-19MB is way too small. For example, it can't fit the whole set of maps to drive from Tucson to Las Vegas. It's only about 450 miles, but it goes through Phoenix, and that's a lot of data. Each new City Select version is a huge increase in size over the previous one, and they sometimes compensate for that by chopping the maps up into smaller chunks. Phoenix went from four chunks to eight chunks in one version, IIRC, but my route to Las Vegas takes me through five of those. Tucson is in two chunks, but I drive through both to get out of town. And there's a two mile stretch going through Hoover dam that's not covered by a Nevada chunk or an Arizona chunk, but rather a chunk that encompasses all of southwest Utah. I could leave one of these chunks out, but that sometimes causes problems with routing when it tries to route from the City Select map to the basemap or vice versa. Additionally , the basemap doesn't actually show the road going through Hoover dam, so if I leave that chunk out, it tries to route me through California. Yeah, my problem can be solved by them creating finer grained chunks of maps in City Select, but that's no excuse for such a pitifully small amount of memory.

-Battery life kind of sucks. That's not a problem in the car, but handheld it is. It's not really terrible, but I think newer models probably do better. I used rechargeables, which were even worse for life, but not so costly. Of course, in my case it's going to be a lot more costly now that one has killed it...

-Serial port is really slow. You can't just add a map chunk. To make any changes to the map set loaded on to it, you have to reload every map. 19MB of that over serial can take an hour, and unless you bought the cable that plugs in to AC and the computer, that's an hour on batteries.


I've been looking for a replacement for the GPS V, and I can't really find one. If I had to buy another GPSr today, it would be the V, which kind of bothers me since it's been three years, and it seems like there must be something better by now. But, everything I look at is either great for the car, but crap for handheld, or vice versa. I refuse to consider a PDA, because I don't think a touch screen is good for the car, and it's not rugged enough. I don't want to put any of the walkie-talkie looking handhelds in the car, because they're too tall to sit on the dash, and I don't want to have to rig up a mount to stick out of the dash. The GPS V was very unobtrusive on the dash. There are some small car ones that also have internal batteries like the Quest, but the Quest doesn't switch to portrait mode, and it might not really fit in your hand well. Plus, it might not be rugged at all.

So, if I had to buy another today, I would begrudgingly buy the GPS V. If Garmin were to announce a GPS VI whose only changes were more memory (or else an industry standard expansion slot), USB connectivity, and internal rechargeable battery, I'd buy that in a heartbeat. Heck, if they announced a GPS V+ whose only change was upping to 128MB, I'd buy that in the same heartbeat. Sure, it would take forever to reload over serial, but I'd need to do it so much less often.

Anyway, I hope that's helpful to you.