If there’s one thing a geek loves more than anything else – besides gadgets – it’s information. Information on anything and everything that interests him or her. This is part of the reason geeks love upscale cars so much because those vehicles have gauge clusters that show you a ton of stuff other cars don’t; they also have much...

PND means Portable Navigation Device, and in general use refers to any portable automotive GPS device. For several years now there have been those that claim PNDs are a dying market and that they will die a quick death. The exact opposite of that has been true. PNDs still continue to sell by the truckload and in addition have become quite advanced in overall...

Over the years I’ve been in a few debates as to whether automotive GPS or a road atlas is better to figure out where you’re going. I do champion automotive GPS technology because they are always better than those cheesy foldout maps you find at rest stops and convenience stores. However I’ve never denied the fact that a proper road atlas will...

Automotive GPS devices while used by many have the issue of difficulty of being able to edit locations on a desktop PC level. There are tools available such as Bing Maps, Google Maps and Google Earth which allow for some fine tuning, but the way in which those sites work is still a bit on the difficult side. Nuvi Editor on the other hand is very easy. It makes...

The Garmin nüvi 255W GPS has been on the market for some time now, but I just got one (upgraded from my nüvi 205), so here’s the scoop on it. I’ll be concentrating on what matters most to the PCMech audience (and if I miss anything you want to know about it, chime in with a comment as I’m very familiar with the nüvi line of products.) In...

Due to an accident that permanently damaged my nuvi 270 (don’t ask, but it was totally my fault), I was put in the situation where I had to buy another GPS. The base model from Garmin right now is the nüvi 205 and that’s the one I bought. The 2×5 (i.e. 205, 215, 255, etc.) is the updated generation from the older 2×0 line (200, 250, 260,...

In 2005 I started using GPS and my first GPS device was a Garmin StreetPilot i3 (I still have it and it still works!) After that I upgraded to the StreetPilot c340, then the StreetPilot c580 and then my current nüvi 270. On a quick check of the Garmin automotive section of their site (I go by there every so often to see the newest offerings) there is not but a...

A few days ago I acquired a new GPS unit, the Garmin nüvi 270. Since my StreetPilot c580 is now a discontinued model I figured it was time for an upgrade to one of the newer and (much) thinner nüvi models. A few notes before continuing: There are only very slight differences between nüvi models 200, 250, 260 and 270, and they are (for United States...

Upon recent acquisition of a Garmin nüvi 270 I found that I had the ability to manually enter in longitude and latitude coordinates for locations. This is a very convenient feature because you can enter in coordinates directly without having to connect the GPS to the computer at all. For those that would ask “Why can’t I just enter in a street...

Garmin will at times post stuff for their GPS units that has absolutely nothing to do with GPS functionality and all to do with fun. For Halloween this year they’ve released six vehicle icons called a Boo! Bundle for use in your nuvi (any nuvi), StreetPilot c510, c530, c550 or c580. These icons replace the standard arrow that’s on the map display...

Something that Garmin GPS users complain about – and rightly so – is that many new units are sold with outdated maps out-of-the-box. After that these same people are more or less forced into buying expensive map updates that cost $70 per unit. Garmin has rolled out something called the nuMaps Guarantee that states: Get the newest maps available and...

The team over at Autoblog acquired an iPhone 3G that touts new GPS features and tested it out. The verdict can be easily figured out just by the title of their post: Should’ve bought a Garmin? Testing the iPhone 3G’s GPS capabilities Before telling you the worst about iPhone 3G GPS, every single thing I knew was going to suck about GPS on the iPhone...

Note: This is the short version. Last week on my personal blog I wrote a very long-winded article about the Garmin City Navigator North America NT Map Update 2009. And yes the title of the product is in fact that long. But anyway, if you want to read up on what I think Garmin needs to do in order to keep up with the times as far as map updating goes, read up if...

There is a way to directly send a Google Maps location to just about any mobile Garmin GPS device (StreetPilot, nuvi, zumo, etc.) Step 1. If you haven’t done so, install the latest Garmin USB drivers. Install the Garmin Communicator Plugin (this is so your web browser can “talk” to Google Maps correctly). Remember to restart your web browser...