I've been using the C320 for a few days, and have some impressions to post. It works well, does its job and all that. But there are a lot of things that bug me, and overall I'm a bit annoyed. It was purchased as an upgrade from our Garmin Quest, but it turns out to be much more of a sidegrade.
Before I begin, let me point you to the very thorough review at
http://gpsinformation.us/c320/c320review.html. That review is by very serious GPS users. What I'll add below is from my own perspective as a much more casual (but fairly easily annoyed) user.
The good: easy to use! The touchscreen really makes address entry fast and effortless. Routing is as good as on our Quest, but route calculation is much, much faster, and route recalculation is almost instant.
The hmm: the unit seems almost too big and the screen too big and bright for my midsize sedan. Others may well feel differently about this.
The annoying:
* 3D mode is not very good. The perspective doesn't match well with your real-world perceptions. At the routed/autozoom level of detail, a ramp exiting at a shallow angle doesn't really diverge from the road at the moment that you should in fact be exiting; you can see it diverging at the very top of the screen, but not where the "you are here" triangle is. If you zoom in enough to get really good readings on where to turn, you can't see very far ahead at all, and if you zoom out enough to see what lies ahead, your navigation's compromised (see the "triangle too big" problem below) and screen updates are much slower.
* 3D mode, continued: if you do not have a route selected -- if you are just driving without guidance, in other words -- the 3D mode's limited detail makes the display pretty unhelpful IMO. It's too bad you can't set separate preferences for display when following a route and display when unrouted.
* 2D mode: not bad, but I wish they'd use fewer pixels showing the width of roads, and instead draw names next to more of the streets. The Quest seems to make better use of its more limited screen real estate.
* In either display mode the triangle indicating your position is much too large, sometimes obscuring important details in your immediate vicinity. For example in 2D mode at the zoom level I like for in-town driving, the triangle representing the car is 400 virtual feet wide and 800 virtual feet long, and gets in the way of nearby streets. Yes, you can zoom in and zoom back out quickly, but I wish I didn't have to. Since the you-are-here triangle is always shown on the same spot on the screen, it's never hard to find and it doesn't
need to be anywhere near this big.
* No "time to next turn" display, just "distance to next turn." Our Quest shows both time and distance to next turn, and I prefer that. I simply find it easier to relate to time-remaining than to distance-remaining.
* When it's powered on (which in my car, which has a switched lighter outlet, means every time the car is started), after its startup sequence it just
sits at the main menu ("Where To?" "Show Map" and buttons for options and brightness). If I start driving without entering a route, it should, duh, just switch to showing the map. Yes, it only takes one touch to switch from the main menu to the map, but the main menu is pretty obnoxiously in your face until you do, and since I'm, y'know, busy
driving, I'd like the unit to do the work for me.
* When dashboard-mounted (windshield mounting is illegal in California), you can't get the unit down closer than about 1.5" from the dashboard. I'd really like it down lower so it will be a little less prominent in my field of view, and also so it won't shout so loudly, "come steal me!" I might be able to disassemble the mount and switch a piece around to make it swivel down further, but I wish they'd built it with dash-mounting a little more in mind to begin with.
* There doesn't seem to be a way to load maps in increments other than a complete state: even if you're just visiting a piece of a state, you need to have room in memory for the whole state. Fortunately you can replace the unit's SD memory card with a larger one (and SD cards are fairly cheap now), so this may be more of a theoretical annoyance than a practical one.
* (Added 1/5) My wife just called to say she has a
hard time seeing the screen while wearing polarized sunglasses. Ouch - I should have checked that at the store, as it's a pretty major issue for either of us. I wonder if this problem is common to all touch-screen models (just as it tends to be hard to use touch-screen ATMs with sunglasses on).
* (Added 1/5) I just realized this thing doesn't show the compass heading on the map. Our Quest does. This bugs me, though arguably you can do without it (if you're routed you theoretically shouldn't care, and if you're not routed, the "next turn" area gives current street and direction, like "Southwest on Main St.")
Overall, this unit is dumbed down in many ways from the Garmin Quest we've gotten used to. There are a lot fewer options and customizations. No via points, no backtrack-along-your-previous route, no altitude display, lots of other things. See the link cited above for a more complete list of things this unit doesn't do that you might wish it would do.
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I'll probably post an update in about a week after my wife's had a few days of relying on it for work.
