G0 720 and Nuvi 260 live comparison.

[glen_s]

After many months of emailing both TomTom and TeleAtlas about there terrible (rural) Alberta coverage, I finally got a chance to check out the competition when my wife was given a Garmin Nuvi 260. I took it out of the box, and stuck it beside my TomTom Go720 and went for a short drive, and the difference was amazing.

The Garmin had ALL the roads in my rural subdivision, and accurately named. I went for about a 50km drive around the surrounding area and not once was I shown off the road, which is quite impressive compared to the 720 as it is for well over 50% of the time in the same area.

I decided to shoot it on video, and the results are here. Please excuse the poor lighting and general over all quality, I was hand holding a sony DSC camera and the lighting compensation on these is marginal at best. I should have shot it at night, as the roads on the 720 unit are better in real life than on the video, but one can see from this how poorly the teleatlas maps are compared to the navteq from this video. If I can find a good mobile tripod I will reshoot, and in darker conditions.

In any case, the obvious lesson in this is if you are living in or going to travel in Alberta at all, get a unit with Navteq maps..

ps. I see that the youtube rendering is not very clear, going to try and find a place where I can post the 640X480 version if anyone wants, its about 50MB

 

[glen_s]

Update - while I'd have to say the TomTom is superior to the Garmin (this model anyway) for nice to have features etc, my wife just took the Garmin on a trip to the city and not only did it keep her on the roads the entire time (no off-road icon) it also told where the gravel roads were when it was calcing shortest route to the city.

 

[mvl]

The roads in this town will still be off in map 830. see maps.google.com in hybrid view which will match the upcoming map and still contains this error.

Turn on "submit anonymous data" and connect to home often. Teleatlas is actively moving streets in its maps based on the anonymous driving data submitted through home, and with many drivers reporting these errors in the area, it should get noticed and fixed faster.

 

[pianoCM]

It looks like either Garmin or Magellan products will be more suitable for you in your area.

 

[glen_s]

It looks like either Garmin or Magellan products will be more suitable for you in your area.

Yes I have to agree - I took the Garmin on a long road trip this last weekend and not once was it off the road, and it showed pretty well all the side roads in the rural areas while the TomTom only showed about 1/2 of them.

So my advice to anyone living in or planning to drive in Alberta is to stay with products that use Navteq. I am curious though on how the Garmin will be in BC when I drive down this summer, last year I drove all across the province and the TomTom was dead-on everywhere.

 

[doctormstein1]

my trip

Don't know about alberta but I know about a trip down the east coast from new york to atlanta. My tom tom 920 was outragous. It worked perfectally door to door with no mistakes and with tom tom traffic my trip was so relaxing, got me out of a few traffic jams and did exactly what a top GPS should do. So when considering GPS units and map, I can't praise enough my tom tom unit.

 

[glen_s]

My TomTom was like that in BC, pretty well 100% accurate no matter where I was. Alberta is a different story though, almost as soon as you hit the BC/AB border it starts going off the road.

Not sure why, but they seem in no hurry to fix it, just check google maps rural coverage compared to yahoo maps in the province and you'll see how far behind they are.