Garmin nüvi 270 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
by Garmin
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Garmin nüvi 270 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
Customer Review: Great Unit with US & Euro Maps
Summary: 5 Stars
Advantages are relatively cheap, has all US and most European maps built in, Also has an SD card slot for other optional area maps.
It does NOT have all the fancy features which for me are fairly useless except to make you pay a lot of money, such as MP3 payers, bluetooth phone speakers, traffic reports for cities, etc. It also does NOT say which road to turn on. For example, much more expensive units might say "Turn right on Main Street", where this GPS only says "Turn right", and you have to read on the top of the display which street to turn on (but it's the one you are at!). This is not a big deal to me.
It is fairly small, which is good and not so good. It is not "wide screen" so it shows less information. However, I think has very acceptable readability, and does not obscure the road while hanging on the suction cup mount. On the other hand, the small size it is easy to pack and take overseas traveling. It is even small enough to carry with you walking around a foreign city so you can get back to the hotel if you get lost. You can walk to restaurants you pick from the unit, and you can even set it to "walk mode" instead of "drive mode" so it ignores one-way streets, etc. when you are walking or bicycling around. Of course, it only has roads programmed in, and not park paths, etc.
It has a built in battery that is charged through the included cigarette lighter plug. It lasts at least 8-10 hours I think? It has a USB charge connection on the GPS, but I think the voltage requirement is higher (1V?) than most laptop computers put out (0.5V), so it may not charge by plugging into a laptop?? I don't know yet.....
It has lots of "Points of Interest" such as restaurants, gas stations, hotels, etc, although some of the POI's in Europe are sometimes sparse. For example I was looking for a ATM cash machine in a little town in Germany, and it said the closest one was 12 miles away. However, there were a few actually in the small town I was in, just not listed.
Also, it has many languages built in for the voice commands. German, Spanish, English, French, Chinese, and many other obscure languages are included. The "British" vs. "American" english accents are entertaining.
Out of the box, it is set up to NOT allow you to program it while moving (Safe Mode). However, this CAN BE SWITCHED OFF to allow a passenger (or a danger seeking driver) to fully program addresses or find Points of Interest when the vehicle is moving.
In short, I would definitely buy it again.
Customer Review: Good technologies with some mysteries
Summary: 3 Stars
My Nuvi 270 arrived two days ago, and after a few minutes to locating satellites, the unit found my location and in all later driving followed my routes faithfully. The POIs are accurate, and reasonably up to date although resturants, gas stations, and hotels have changed names although not locations. The routing to destinations seems good with my limited experience although the estimated mileage to destinations I have visited often seems underestimated.
I purchased the Nuvi 270 unit (my first GPS) for upcoming trips to Midwest USA, England, and Northern Europe. I anticipate that it will perform well with mapping and directing my movements in these regions.
But I suspect that the unit has many additional capabilities that I have not been able to learn because the "manual" for the unit is a joke. Where is a full guide for users who want to fully use the Nuvi 270's features? This lack of documentation is the primary reason that I give the Nuvi 270 only three stars instead of 5.
Presently I would like to learn how simulate directions from a location different from the present location of my unit. For example how can I sit in California and find the driving directions from Bloomsbury in London to Oxford. How can I display a map of my likely destinations? (I find that "sliding" the map with my finger, will bring me to London. But I can not then zoom in without the map display changing back to my home.) Without better information I guess I will have to wait until I arrive in England.
Another issue where better documentation might help is in the use of the picture viewer. This is a rather nice feature, and a fairly large number of pictures on a SD card can be displayed in a slide show. The show can be stopped at a particular slide, and the image can be enlarged and "slided" to regions of interest. However with a large number of pictures (arranged in directories on the SD card), I can not figure out how to view efficiently a picture far down the list of files. The Nuvi 270 appears to not allow the user to use the directory structure for images, but rather just presents a long list of pictures that take a long time to sequentially display and provide only a slide show with all of the pictures. What is a user supposed to do: buy many SD cards with different sets of pictures?
I am very happy with the unit, and in no way do I regret my purchase. However with more attention must be made to users who want to get maximum benefit from their investment.
Customer Review: European trip experience
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought the Garmin nuvi 270 only a couple of days before leaving for a month-long driving trip in Europe. The decision to purchase this particular unit was influenced mostly by the included US and European maps, and to some extent the cost. It was intended to be a backup GPS for the NAVI systems in the rental cars. The day before we left, I used the upgrade option to download and install the latest European maps, since we would be doing quite a bit of driving in remote areas, and wanted the most up-to-date maps we could get. It turned out to be a critical device, since the first rental car came with a nuvi 270 handed to me in a case that was quite a bit older than my own, and the second rental had a German-only NAVI system.
The trip included Switzerland, northern Italy, a bit of France, then northern Germany and along the Baltic coast to the Gdansk area of Poland. We spent time in some cites - Zurich, Venice, Monaco - where the terrain or tall buildings might have affected reception, but never had a problem acquiring and keeping satellites. The unit was also very good about keeping and or immediately re-acquiring satellites through the numerous tunnels on the Italian auto-stradas. There were a few isolated incidents in the Dolomites where traveling in a deep valley between cliffs resulted in dropped signals, but the unit always re-acquired after a change in highway direction.
I can't say enough about the accuracy and level of detail in the maps. We explored some very remote areas and always had more than enough detail to find our way into and out of anything. We even navigated down un-named dirt tracks in a forest in Poland that were on the map.
We had one case in a small Italian hillside town near the Cinque Terre that the unit sent us up a one-lane street between buildings with a number of 90 degree turns that ended in a set of stairs before the street continued. We could only laugh as we ended up backing out of that one.
We did use the pedestrian mode in Zurich, and again in Venice. It worked very well in both cities. However, please remember to set it back to vehicle mode before driving. I forgot once in Zurich and ended up driving the wrong way down a street, with a streetcar coming at me.
I am thoroughly impressed with the device - a superb value.
Customer Review: Garmin Nuvi 270
Summary: 3 Stars
The Nuvi270 is a small bit of a disappointment. In a recent trip to Europe, the only reason I pruchased the 270, it was able to find all addresses but did not know about more recent changes to the street map. In Prague, it kept insisting on bringing me to the same left turn that was no longer allowed since an ad hoc square was put in that place for the last 6 months. It could not find another way of getting me to my hotel. I was able to get to within 1 block of my destination and had to park and find out how to enter the street. It also had a tendency in Innsbruck to take me down remarkably narrow streets when I missed a turn, one of which dead ended requiring some backing up in very narrow quarters. Finally as mentioned in other reviews, it takes a long time to acquire satellites. IN europe, it may take 5-10 minutes to get acquisition which in some cases means you may already be going the wrong way. I now pre-program the address while in the airport and let the acquisition program run.
UPDATE:
I have been using the 270 for the last 5 weeks and am starting to understand its quirks. I have found that in Europe, while it continues to take a fair amount of time for sat. acquisition, this only occurs when it is not under the car's battery power. I find that acquisition time is about 2-4 minutes when plugged in and on the car's windshield. On a trip from Munich to Milan, I was able to have dueling GPS in that the car I rented had a DVD system and I was able to compare the two units. The Garmin faired well. It was able to take me to the hotel and then office address number where the car's GPS only take me to the street. The Garmin wanted me to do an illegal left turn in Milan, but quickly recalculated the route as I kept going straight. It continues to occasionaly take me down a route that puzzles me in that while it is shorter in distance, takes longer than if I stayed on the Autobahn. I confirmed my settings are for fastest route. I would say that I would probably opt for the Nuvi 370 if I were to do it again. Primarily for the satellite acquisition time. I have an 360 and noticed that it conistently finds satellites faster than the 270 when I am in the states.
Customer Review: Very nice GPS for the money
Summary: 4 Stars
I feel compelled to provide a review based upon my experience with the unit in France and around town in Los Angeles. This is my first GPS and selected it based upon the fact that it had North America, and most importantly western Europe maps already loaded. When I bought it earlier in 2009, it was $135 from Amazon. Although it is a relatively "basic" unit (no text to speech, no Bluetooth, no traffic reports, etc.), I found it quite adequate for our needs. I appreciated the minimal instructions and found that many of the features were quite intuitive. I also found that it was able to perform many functions that other reviewers didn't seem to figure out. For example, while sitting at home, I was able to navigate my way around Paris (not in GPS mode) with routing, etc. So, when it was time to drive in Paris, I already had a pretty good idea of my navigation. It took me a little while to figure out to use longitude/latitude functions, but once I did, they worked great -- this turned out to be a godsend as I had left most of my directions and lodging details at home -- one of the B&Bs we were to stay at was out vineyards of the Loire Valley (Samur region) and all I had were GPS coordinates. The Nuvi took us right to their doorstep. Another nice suprise was that this unit did work well in ~98% of the cases in pedestrian mode whether in Paris, the Loire countryside, and anywhere in Normandy. I wonder if some of the other reviewers did not switch it from driving to pedestrian mode? One of the most troublesome areas of navigation that I had was in the round-abouts. I'm not sure I can really blame the GPS, but I did miss the exit at least 20% of the time. My recommendation for anyone is to drive around at least 2 times before choosing the offramp. I also found that the 3D mode was easier for me to determine my direction in those evil roadway intersections. One more nice surprise to get warnings of the sections of the autoroute that are using radar. The best surprise was when the GPS took us on routes that were probably the most scenic through forests and vineyards -- although not the fastest (even though it was in the fastest routing mode), it was worth the extra time....