Garmin iQue M5 - 3.5 in. Handheld GPS Receiver

One of my friends from college works for Garmin, which means she is nice enough to get us discounts on their GPS products. Most recently we upgraded to the Garmin StreetPilot® c330 GPS Receiver and are no longer using the Garmin iQue® M5 GPS Receiver, but it served us well for about a year. It retailed for $699.

The device comes with a car kit that allows you to plug it into a battery charger and includes a speaker to amply the voice. You can buy one that is like a rubberized pillow that you set on your dash or the one it comes with attaches to your front window or permanently to your dash. Be careful driving in California or Minnesota and make sure not to attach it to your window, as that is illegal.

I found either method of attachment still allowed for good visibility of the receiver. And even when you buy little plastic sheets that are scratch guard I was always able to view the display. It was bright and readable. The display is 3.5" diagonal, 320 x 240-pixel, with 64 K colors and a bright white LED backlight. In addition to scratch guards you can buy, it also has a leather flip cover to help protect it as well.

GPS units aren't tracking devices. What they do is sort of the equivalent of measuring their distances from satellites. Like you are 200 miles west of X, 100 miles north of Y and 75 miles south-east of Z so you are at point A. As you move in a certain direction your distances from the satellites change and your location changes. That is why this is called a receiver. It does not send any information to anything, it just uses the info it receives about distance to place your location. The average accuracy of our location was usually in the twenties feet.

So although it can say where you are, knowing your longitude and latitude, alteast for most people, isn't very helpful. It comes with base maps of major US highways. But you have to load maps that have streets and other locations, which come included on a cd with the product called MapSource® City Select® North America, that is only Windows, and not Mac, compatible, for that information to make any sense. Right now they are on version 7. You can pay for the upgrades that come out once a year. The unit itself does comes with 64MB to load maps onto. But the memory is expandable with SD cards.

The maps on the cd are very extensive. You can search for locations by type, like food or attraction or atm location. You can also search by writing in/or using the on screen keyboard the name of the location you want to find. Or you can enter in addresses in the address book and tell it to map to those locations. Additionally you could just put in an intersection. I found it pretty easy to use and usually the results came up very quickly. Another nice thing is that if you found a location that wasn't on the map you could email Garmin to include it in their next release.

Before you go somewhere though the unit has to know where you are to calculate the trip. Sometimes it seemed to take a long time to 'find' us. Usually no more than 2-3 minutes though. Obviously if it's really cloudy and it can't receive the signal and find the satellites it will take longer. It does have a screen that shows you your 'found' satellite status and it is always sort of fun to find out how well and with how many satellites you are connecting.

Sometimes a route could be inaccurate based on road construction, but you can put in limitations, like don't go on a specific street, etc. As with any map make sure to follow actual road signs and directions over any directions the GPS gives you.

The directions were by default read by a female voice, but you could download and choose other voices to use as well. Other languages too. The only thing about the voice was I wish it would have said the name of the street you were supposed to turn on. Instead it would say "in .5 miles exit ramp right" not "in .5 miles exit at exit 4, Main Street."

The unit runs on Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 and has a 416 MHz Intel processor. So not only was it a GPS but it was usable as a PDA as well. It is a little bigger than most PDA, but not overly so. For the most part it ran sufficiently fast.

The battery life was significantly longer than the last GPS we had, the Garmin iQue® 3600 GPS Receiver, with 5-7 hours of use. Mostly we always kept it connected to the car kit, rarely using any of its PDA features or battery alone life.

It has a Bluetooth® transceiver, although we never used that feature. But one we did use was to buy an SD network card and get online via wireless internet. It was a little hard on such a small screen but it did work.

It has a microphone and allows you to save MP3s to it and then tell it to play them, with a special software package. They could be played via the car kit through your car speakers or with headphones plugged in directly.
Also if you have saved locations you could verbally tell it to take you there rather than using the stylus. To me these features were more of a toy than anything, but my husband liked using them.

I am sad to see that this unit is discontinued, according to the Garmin website. It was a great GPS to use in our cars and helped us keep from getting lost in many cities around the country.