Don't Let the Small Size Fool You!

Within a week I purchased a Garmin Streetpilot c330, a Magellan Roadmate 300 (RM300), and the Garmin Quest. I kept the Quest -- it's not just a better value priced at hundreds less, it's actually a far better GPS. The Quest is effectively a miniaturized Garmin Streetpilot 2610, one of the best and most full-featured automotive GPS products on the market.

Superior features of the Quest, which borrow heavily from the high end Streetpilot 26xx series --

*Routes*
Most small automotive GPS's only store points, not routes. When you want to go somewhere, you select a destination, and then the unit automatically calculates a route from your current location. With most models, there's usually not much you can do to alter the route after that.

However, the Quest allows you to customize routes with "via points" -- landmarks you want to pass through on your trip. Then, instead of just saving the various individual points, the Quest allows you to save entire sequences of points as routes.

(While the Roadmate 300 allows you to construct a "trip" as a series of auto-routed destinations, it will not chain the destinations seamlessly. The RM300 expects the driver to stop or shut the unit off between destinations, or to manually tell it when to proceed to the next point. The Quest's via points are seamless. It tells you when you're approaching the via point, and then it automatically continues navigating.)

*Routing parameters*
In addition to using via points, the Quest allows the following inputs:
Avoid U-turns
Avoid Toll Roads
Avoid Unpaved Roads
Avoid Freeways
Avoid Specific Road Segments
Avoid Specific Areas
Route for shortest distance
Route for fastest time
There are also four levels of compromise between "Quickest Calculation" and "Best Route."

Additionally, the Quest's included mapping software allows you to tell it how fast you drive on various road types, ensuring "fastest time" calculations that truly are.

For comparison, the Streetpilot c330 can only avoid U-Turns, Tolls, Unpaved Roads and Freeways, and although it offers a choice of shortest distance or fastest time, it offers no control between best route and fastest calculation. What's more, the c330's route selections do not seem as well thought out as the routes generated by the Quest in "best route" mode.

*Display control*
The Quest allows you to control the level of detail and font size for different types of display elements, as well as the maximum scale at which each type of element is displayed. The c330 allows you to turn each type on and off, and only provides a global level-of-detail control. The RM300 does not offer any control over the relationship between scale and detail, and in my opinion it generally does not show enough detail until you zoom way in on a point of interest.

And even though the Quest's display is small, it's razor sharp and brilliant (with backlighting on; this can be turned off to conserve power when operating on battery).

While touchscreens are appealing, the Quest is surprisingly easy to use without one. Garmin has thoughtfully laid out the eight main buttons, and the most important ones do different things depending on how many times you press them or if you hold them down. And because it's not a touchscreen, you'll never be bothered by fingerprints. In my opinion, this unit's display is less susceptible to glare than the protective coating on many other models, though it's still not as good as the display on Streetpilot 26xx models.

*A few words about memory*
The Quest only has 115MB available for maps. Since the entire continental U.S. takes almost 2000MB, obviously you can only load a limited area into the Quest at once. However, Garmin has really worked hard to take the hassle out this, and there are strategies that can be used to load maps into the Quest, depending on how you travel. Either way, you can use the Quest for surprisingly long trips without having to reload it.

First, you have to understand that the Quest includes a "basemap" of the interstate highway system. Not much detail, but enough that you should never get lost on a major highway -- even when you've driven off the currently-loaded map. When you drive past the limits of your detailed map, the basemap kicks in automatically.

The mapping software displays North America as a mosaic of perhaps 2000 tiles averaging about 1.5MB each. Since densely populated areas include more points, the tiles are smaller in urban areas. Major interstates are visible on the mosaic.

If you never travel outside a certain region, you can load that entire region into your Quest for uninterrupted coverage. 115MB can typically hold 3 complete states, less if you include a very dense area like New York City or Los Angeles.

If you're planning a trip, however, you can select all the tiles along the major interstates you plan on using. I was able to map from Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles on my Quest by selecting all the tiles along I-10. Similarly, by mapping a corridor along I-95, even including Baltimore and Washington, D.C., I could go from Jacksonville to New Jersey with about 60MB.

Finally, you can elect to load only the cities or areas where you're going to be getting off the freeway. Between cities, the basemap provides sufficient detail to keep you from getting lost. As an alternative, you could choose to load only a few significant stops on a longer trip. For example, Lumberton, North Carolina, is a great meal stop on I-95. I could leave Florida with a comprehensive map of New England, and still have room to map a couple of choice towns, like Lumberton, that are on the way.

On the bright side, memory-limited GPS's come with better PC software. The c330, for example, already has full U.S. maps installed, and therefore comes with no software. Even the top line Streetpilot 2620 has no real PC connectivity out of the box. The Quest's 128MB obliges Garmin to include some pretty decent software that usually has to be purchased separately.

I also found the Quest's suction-cup mount to be almost as good as the c330's, and far superior to the one on the RM300. Its small size allows allows you to mount it in places where a bigger GPS couldn't go, from both the physical and driver visibility standpoints.

The Quest is a great GPS, with features of much more expensive models. Despite its small size and low price, it blows away many mid-range units. If you want a GPS that can really assist with navigation, you would do well to pass up a lot of more expensive models in favor of the Quest.