| Brand: | Garmin | ||
| Average Rating |
|
Stay connected and ahead of the curve with n?vi 885T. This premium navigator features voice-activated navigation, lane assist with junction view, MSN Direct and hands-free calling capability. You can keep both hands on the wheel, tell n?vi where to go and maneuver complicated interchanges with ease. It comes with a widescreen display, preloaded maps and more. more info
Related posts:
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Review Nuvi 885T
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
The 885T is overall a good, but not excellent, product. Some of the short comings include: not being very good in providing the most accurate routes to take (round about routes are sometimes offered) and not allowing one to select “fastest time” or “shortest distance” at the moment a “where to” selection is made. When using the “hands free” telephone feature, the voice sounds very distant to the other party when the unit is windshield mounted. If the aforementioned problems are corrected, the unit would receive a five star rating. Until then, I can only give it a three.
Slow, non-responsive, lock-ups, highly inaccurate.
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
I really wanted to like this. I really did! But Garmin obviously cut corners and put slow low quality parts into this very expensive device. Here is a list of the items I found to be bad.
1) Slow : Inputting anything to the device was terrible at best. I would often hit the touch screen keypad and get NO response. After several hits it finally responded to the last fist key punches. I then needed to erase the last couple of letters. However; slow again and would not respond to key touches. After rebooting several times and working with all the other interfaces, I realized this is a very slow device – meaning slow processor. Several other times I typed in places of interest, such as Wells Fargo, and the hour glass would spin for over 10 minutes. I would often have to hit the back button or power down and restart the device. If you do not have patience and expect a fast responsive device for $500 ($350 at Amazon), you will be disappointed. For this much money – Garmin SHOULD have put faster – more responsive components into this device.
2) Non-responsive : I would also like to point out that sometimes you will get the hour glass of death – as I like to call it. After entering your search, the hour glass just keeps on spinning forever. There should be some sort of time out or feedback that it cannot find what you are looking for.
3) Lock-up. The device locks up. I drove from San Jose to San Rafael and the device locked up 3 times – which means you have to reboot. This was one of the most disappointing flaws in the device.
4) Inaccurate: I was out of town and needed to get cash at a bank – Wells Fargo. The Garmin, after spinning for ever, said .5 miles. “Awesome!” I thought. “Go .5 miles and turn right on A st. Go .1 miles and turn right on B st. Go .8 miles and turn on C st. Go 1.3 miles and turn left on D st. Go 3.2 miles….” At that point I was a bit upset. Not only did this thing not lead me to the bank within .5 miles, it put me in a EXTREMELY bad neighborhood! I then turned off the device and quickly backtracked. I finally had to stop and asked directions.
The Garmin 885t was a huge disappointment. It has proved to be completely useless. Garmin charges a lot for their GPS devices. That should equate to higher quality – faster components. But it looks like they opted to go with slower cheaper processors to maximize their profit – huge mistake. I have since asked others about their Garmin GPSs and I hear a lot of similar complaints. Slow slow slow and inaccurate. “welcome to the Garmin world” is what I hear a lot. I have a friend who just bought the Garmin 1490 and he says it is worse than his old one. I am not certain what is going on at Garmin, but this latest line is not helping them. I will go back to my google maps as they have proven to be very accurate.
Buying GTM 20 Lifetime subscription VS using Receiver came with GPS
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
Pros:
Automatic Bluetooth telephone connection and excess of all contact list in the phone. No pairing process needed.
Voice recognition is indeed very good and is convenient to use.
Map update is good and found other address Magellan did not find.
Very good customer support.
Removable battery is a good idea making easy to replace when necessary.
Cons:
Speaker volume not good enough but not a show stopper.
Ding dong audible sound when making turns is missing unlike other GPS but not bad.
Shall I buy GTM 20 lifetime subscription for traffic or should I pay $100 to MSN for life and use receiver that came with 885T?
Can somebody help?
I do believe this is one the best in the market and I made good choice. I am enjoying it.
Garmn 885T is excellent, but traffic should be free for this price
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This is the GPS to get if you want to talk to your unit to free your hands from having to touch the display, say, in heavy traffic,etc. as it does do a good job recognizing voices, even when there is some road noise. It does not include few features that the model lacking the voice recognition, however, such as the 785 which has 3d buildings and a couple other features the 885T doesn’t, which seems stupid, since this is the top model of this type GPS, and is far from cheap. The lane indicators are very helpful and are good looking. Being able to replace the battery is nice. I have two batteries, since I sometimes use this Garmin in pedestrian mode and the battery lasts for about three hours. Great for travel, I set my hotel location, then I know that I will be able to find my way back easily in any city. And I can go way out to rural areas by car, and find my way back with no problem, which is important, especially when night falls. Having to pay extra for traffic seems a burn, and a stupid marketing move, since lesser and cheaper Garmin units offer free traffic.
Isn’t technology supposed to move forward?
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
This is my third Garmin GPS. I wished I loved it but I don’t. Regardless, I won’t return it. I mainly bought this unit for two reasons: I wanted the voice recognition and the lane display. I’ve found myself too often both not knowing which lane to take (I am thinking Seven Corners in DC) or looking for a restaurant in the middle of a drive and having to just take an exit only to search for the place in my GPS. I’ll comment on those features first. The lane display works quite well, at least where I do my driving, both in DC and Southern California. While it is my understanding that the feature is not available in more rural areas, I also think that probably in those areas it is not all that necessary. I feel a little cheated though. The feature is both a combination of new map information and the software to display the icons showing the lanes in the freeway. This feature could have been implemented in my older Garmin unit without problems with maps and firmware downloads, but obviously Garmin has no interest in that. Another useful improvement that lets you group favorites by category could also have been an easy fix in old devices. The voice recognition receives a mixed review. It only works when everything is very quiet, and even then I find myself yelling at the device. Granted, I have an accent, but the unit seems to be able to deal with it at some times and not at all at others. My main issue with it, however, is that it still forces you to look at the screen when using it, which sort of defeats the purpose. However, the activation through a control attached to the steering wheel works very well, it’s quite clever, and you end up knowing what options to select out of habit. The search by spelling feature is perplexing, because it works reasonably well in spoken mode. It’s a mistery why the device can understand me saying a random word and not one of the preset options in the menu.
I do have serious concerns about the unit. First, the speaker is, as most reviews say, extremely underpowered. Makes you wonder if the people at Garmin ever test their products. I know that somebody at that company made the decision to go with this particular speaker over what they were using before. It’s infuriating because the effect is very obvious. This leads to a second issue, and a more important one. Because the volume is so low, I can’t use the device with my cell phone like I did before. A conversation becomes impossible. Another annoyance is that when I used to pair my previous Garmin with my phone, it would upload my contacts and allow me to use them for dialing. No more. This Garmin forces you to dial by number every time. If you are like me, you no longer remember any numbers. I honestly don’t even remember my home or office number. You could try to supply the sound to your car audio system by using the integrated FM transmitter. In my experience it doesn’t work very well. Even if it did, I don’t want to spend my trip listening to static and the annoying synthetic voice from the unit. And I like NPR.
The MSN service… what to say. I’ve mainly used the traffic feature. I’ve played with other information, and found the movie times complete and precise. The flight information provided only departures, not arrivals, don’t ask why. My main gripe is with the traffic information, though. It is quite useless. For example, the freeway that takes me to work always appears in the unit as heavy traffic. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. The problem is that the unit will try to route around this supposed traffic. In my case that means taking a parallel highway with traffic lights. What the unit doesn’t know, but I do, is that when traffic is heavy on the freeway it is also heavy on that highway. There is no traffic information for anything other than major freeways. The unit can perfectly route you from a fluid freeway to a congested road. So much for help. The information is so bad that I’ve learnt to ignore it. Got tired of seeing supposed congestions where there were none, and stuck in traffic with the unit happily displaying fluid traffic conditions. The one neat feature is that you can send addresses to your GPS from the Bing search engine wirelessly. That saves time. But you could always plug the device and send the address through the USB port. I still don’t know if I will sign up for the service once the 3 month trial is over. But that is just the geek in me not wanting to remove any features. I don’t think the service is worth it as it is now, but they could fix the traffic information in the future. This issue was exactly the same with my old unit, which also had MSN service.
In conclusion, this model is larger than my Street Pilot, it does have the two features that I wanted, and mostly they work. The negative part is that things that my Street Pilot does very well, like connecting with my cell, or routing, are not only not improved, but actually made worse by two years of development from Garmin and Microsoft. And all the other novelties don’t really make up for it. I don’t expect progress in every feature from one generation to the next, but I also don’t expect things to get worst. Next time I will start looking at the GPS units from the competition. I can’t recommend this product, but I was such a Garmin fan that I don’t really know what the competition looks like. What I can tell you is that if you are just looking you might want to wait for updated units, where Garmin might return to do what they used to do very well. Right now they seem to be more worried about competing with the GPS service in your cell phone (yes, they have developed a cell phone). If you do need a GPS unit, and you do want hands-free operation, then this will take you there. If you only want the lane display, that functionality is common in other much less expensive devices. If you don’t care about either, but you want the GPS unit to double as a bluetooth receiver for your cell phone, look elsewhere.
So fun to use..I even use it when I know where I’m going!
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
Easy to use straight out of the box. ANYONE can use this…you dont have to be a gadget guru. It is incredibly user friendly. So far it has been very accurate/reliable with only an ocassional “hiccup”. The display is very easy to see during day and night. Sound clarity is great but didnt work AT ALL through FM transmitter (I dont need that feature anyway). I was pleasantly surprised that the bluetooth feature worked flawlessly even though my phone is not listed as being compatible (Verizon LG Dare)with this GPS unit. The only reason I gave this 4 stars instead of 5 is because the voice recognition feature got commands wrong more often than not. If you are buying this unit just for that you may want to reconsider.
BUYER BEWARE: Amazon Does Not Work With You on Exchanges
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
I read though all of the information on the Garmin 88T and thought it would be a great GPS. When I received it I called MSN for my free three month trial and was told that MSN was not supported in my area. I was also told the $129.00 life time MSN package was no longer available. The customer service rep. suggested I could go to Best Buy and get a prepaid card for the lifetime package if they still had any (made me wonder why I bought through Amazon instead of Best Buy). When I tried to exchange the Garmin 885T for a Garmin model 1490T which does have a traffic receiver that works in my area I was told I can’t exchange I would have to return it, wait for a refund from Amazon and buy the other Garmin. I was also told my refund could take up to four weeks. I really feel like Amazon let me down with this and I wanted others to BEWARE.
885t needs hotfix first before it can be called an upgrade
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
I recently upgraded from the Nuvi 760 to the Nuvi 885t, it’s now more than a month since I played around with it and the more I use it the more flaws I uncover. For starter the POI are extremely slow to search beyond usable time, and at times the touch respond command on the screen lagged several times during POI search, the streets names on the map do not appear or at times lagged or every other street names pop up and some do not pop up and at times the street names pop up as I pass the street a block away, how useless is that? And the map settings are on Normal and tried other settings for the streets to appear but no luck just simply lagged on loading street names on View Map mode. One major down grade from the 760 to the 885t was the View Map mode at display on upcoming streets and fwy exits because there is none, the 885t only display the current street that it’s traveling on. That should really be fixed to be able to switch to current traveling street to upcoming ones. I tried every possible setting and updated it to the current versions and it’s still sluggish. Lane Assist, Bluetooth, Voice Command, MSN Direct, Games, is great icing on the cake but the cake itself is poorly design.
Bottom line is that it is not an upgrade from the Nuvi 760. The 885t is a 2 star rating at Amazon for me as it did little for my money.
I hope there are some answers to my problems/hotfix.
885T is great!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
The 885T provides an excellent map, rapid recalculation of routes and vivid display. I especially like the 3D presentation and the option to use in bicycle or pedestrian mode.
Great at Bluetooth
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Bought this for my husband because I had trouble hearing him talking on his cell phone when he was in his car. Works great. The maps although updated don’t give the best route all the time but it works better at road names like veterans highway. My GPS couldn’t even find the road I had to stop at a police station and they told me the numerical name for the road. He’s disappointed that he can’t figure out how to talk on bluetooth and get verbal directions at the same time. But all in all it’s a very helpful device.