GPS

I just got one of these; a Garmin StreetPilot i2 Vehicle Navigation GPS System. It was only $220 from Amazon.

I partly got it because I have a big car trip coming up, and partly because my office mate Dave has a GPS (though a completely different system) and he's been going on about that a fair bit lately.

The i2 is the base model; it has a black and white screen and only enough memory for a few states. I managed to load MA, ME, NY, NJ and PA into the memory. I could buy a new memory card for about $40 and be able to load all of the US into it, but I'm going to wait on that.

The black and white screen seems fine for basic navigation. When you are looking at the maps zoomed out it's a little hard to tell what's going on; color would be much more helpful for that.

So far I have used it to navigate to work and to the sub shop (both places I already know how to get to!) It did a good job in both cases; though it wanted me to take a different route to what I normally take, it happily recalculated when I deviated from it's prescribed path.

I guess the big test will be the trip coming up, and going places I haven't been to before!