[dhyde79]

I'm gonna be doing a few road trips in the near future and I've decided rather than buying a full GPS unit I'm gonna grab a GPS puck for my 8330, internal GPS works, but, I don't feel like having to wait 30 minutes for it to connect and grab the GPS system to tell me where I am, I'm not fond of telenav, and would by far rather spend the money once and be done with it (and I don't like telenav in general, tried it in hawaii and it was just too slow....)

I'm currently doing the toss up between getting Garmin's puck and Software for $150 direct from them, or ordering one of the pucks through the crackberry store and using whatever free software solution is out there that works well.

what suggestions do you guys have? I'd **LIKE** to find one that has pre-loaded maps via microSD so I can just load up what I need onto the card and go...but, I know that won't happen very readily....

[berrynifty]

Garmin Mobile is $99, and if it's anything like my Garmin 200W, it would be great. Another poster recommended it.

[FF22]

I played with the Garmin software for a bit with my Freedom 2000 puck - you can use the Garmin with someone else's puck. I really did not get a change to form an impression of it during the trial.

Apparently, Garmin's prior offering did include maps on an SD card so that you could use it in places were NO data was available.

I did play more on my recent trip to Utah with Verizon's offering. It was not bad but did lose connection in some more rural areas where there was no data.

I have been finding, though, that since they rely in data coming in and going out, that can take a bit more time in areas which have closely located streets and so it might miss a turn instruction. A standalone gps unit does not suffer from having to get out and get data so the maps are RIGHT THERE in the unit - so, in my experience, quicker responses.

[Clod]

Somebody really needs to perfect the whole navigation thing on a Blackberry. I am super surprised that Garmin does not allow you to use the internal GPS option on the BB and allow you to save all the maps to the SD card. Why in the world must people have a data plan for this to work?
When the heck is somebody going to do this right? It seems so simple to me.

[dhyde79]

well, I got my keychain 2000, tried live search, tried garmin, have google maps, bbmaps.....don't like live search, and the garmin software.....well, if I said it was accurate when I tried it, I'd be lying, it, like live search both report me as being about 2 1/2 miles northeast of where I'm at....however, GM and BBM are both dead on accurate....I'm quite happy with it, though, the downloading of the maps isn't the hottest, the fact that I constantly pull 9-10 sat's when I was lucky to get 3 on internal GPS, I'm happy.