Comments on: Garmin fails miserably on user experience and service design

By: Nathan Brazil

Nathan Brazil — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:47:02 +0000

Klaus says:

“I must say that Garmin is shaping up. Now the mygarmin.com website will recognize your unit (you have to install a small plugin though, but it works flawlessly), and let you upgrade firmware and maps directly to your unit. Nice.”

Unless you are using IE 8 and have Data Excution Prevention turned on in Windows XP (SP3). In that case, Windows tells you that it closed IE to prevernt a malicious or broken plug-in from using memory incorrectly. ARrrrggghhh!!!

By: Klaus Silberbauer

Klaus Silberbauer — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:49:34 +0000

Hmm… Went ahead and bought the 765t. I should have stuck with my 660, though. Here’s why:

- The 765t features 3D buildings, but you don’t need them And they slow down the map redraw. They can be turned off, though.

- The map rendering is painstakingly slow. And the map redraws from scratch all the time. Not ok. I guess that’s the price to pay for nice anti-aliasing and smooth graphics. Give me fast rendering, any time, please.

- The eco-route-thing is utterly useless. Who wants to spend 50% more time driving to save a few bucks? This is eco-nonsense.

- You can’t(!) turn off the damn beep everytime you touch the screen without turning off all sounds. This was possible on the 660. OMG, WHY HAS THIS CONTROL BEEN REMOVED??

- Worst of all: Garmin has chosen to save some bucks on the LCD screen. It’s quite clearly of bad quality. Compared to the 660 it’s rubbish. About one out of ten time you press the screen it screws up the coordinates and prints another letter than you’ve pressed. And not just the letter besides the one you pressed, no, a completely random letter. This is not OK for a unit in that price range.

Nice stuff:

- Custom routes.
- Text to speech in Danish (at last)
- Maps seems reasonably up-to-date (and the 60 days map guarantee works)

It seems like Garmin has trown together this unit just to get something out there. If you have a 660 or something like it: Don’t bother upgrading. Buy a new map and enjoy your old unit for one more year.

Newt time it WILL be a Tomtom for me.

By: Klaus Silberbauer

Klaus Silberbauer — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:26:38 +0000

I must say that Garmin is shaping up. Now the mygarmin.com website will recognize your unit (you have to install a small plugin though, but it works flawlessly), and let you upgrade firmware and maps directly to your unit. Nice.

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:15:51 +0000

After getting hung up on the “no internet connection” response during the updating of the CNNA 2010 map, I talked to a couple of IT guys at work. During the conversation, the question of whether I had disabled my software firewalls came up. Of course, I had done that (of course, of course). But then, it occurred to me that perhaps my hardware firewall might be causing the problem. Came home, got into the hardware firewall configuration menu, and allowed the computer on which (or through which) I was attempting to conduct the update to be directly connected to the internet (by disabling the “DMZ” protocol for that computer).

Voila. The update worked like a charm.

The guys at work had suggested I connect directly to the internet (bypassing the router), but that would have involved moving some equipment.

But that might work for some of you.

My router is a Linksys WRT54G.

By: Klaus Silberbauer

Klaus Silberbauer — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:06:19 +0000

Well, I do find that Garmin’s products are pretty ok. My 660 has worked for years. The GUI is nice and simple, and it just always works.. It’s only the service part that’s lacking.

I agree that all updates should be done online, though. 2GB isn’t that much of a download these days.

By: kiwidoc

kiwidoc — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 04:46:18 +0000

Well its just such a stupid business model. In this age why do we have to wait for a physcial product to update a piece of software? I run garmin XT on a pda phone. The official garmin way is for that to be delivered on a 2 gig card. I have a 16 gig card for all the music I like to listen to while driving. Needless to say the unofficial ways to get it installed are easier.
I’m off to Denmark for a onference and will be there for 4 days, surely any sensible business would let me pay my money to download a city map of Copenhagen, even put a tim expiy on it. Nope, expected to go throught the hassle of buying a small card to replace my large card in my phone. So…
I don’t think Garmin will survive as a company if they can’t understand that the world is online. I’ll give them til 2012 then they’ll go bust.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:26:45 +0000

Little late maybe, but have not read this until today. Now I will not suggest anyone to travel all the way to Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman, but thats were you get very good service. Arriving there I already had a Garmin Nuvi 660 with Europe / Scandinavia maps installed. Then I purchased an Oman / Middle East map at Garmin in Muscat early this year. They offered to come to my home with the map, at no charge, just to free me from finding their shop. However, I went to the shop, and they immediately said, “shall we install it for you sir”? “We will not charge you for that, but we know it can be a little tricky”!
I accepted there offer and within 20 minutes everything was up and running. They even gave me a cable, which I had forgotten to bring from Europe, free of charge. My thanks and sincere compliments to Garmin in Muscat for their good service.

By: Garmin nüvi

Garmin nüvi — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:37:43 +0000

On my mind, garmin is the best navigator. I have been using tomtom for a while, but Garmin nuvi 770 is much better!

By: Vaughan

Vaughan — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:59:36 +0000

I’ve had an identical problem as well … but have now resolved it, and have just successfully loaded the City Navigator Europe NT 2008 update onto my Nuvi 660FM.

My PC system is Windows XP Home with SP3 and using IE7. I disabled all firewall and AV software, and also closed down all non essential programs running in the background.

Garmin Tech Support had previously given me a long list of stuff to try, but nothing worked, even after they sent me the DVD disk to try.

What eventually worked for me was a very simple change … it was to UNCHECK the box in Tools > Internet Options > Connections > LAN settings which offers to “automatically detect settings”.

After doing that, everything worked smoothly, although it does take a very long time – about 2.5 hours, as the DVD has to copy the map update files to your PC hard drive, and then copy these across to your Garmin.

By: Vladimir

Vladimir — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:56:08 +0000

Suggestion. It found connection after I have rebooted computer. Then after couple of horrible exceptions ‘disk not found’, I am moving data to Garmin.