My son had given me his old one when he upgraded his. It's a fun gadget to me especially when Johnny is driving. He gets so annoyed by it especially when he thinks he knows better directions than the GPS. With all the new vehicles practically making this feature a standard feature I was wondering if anyone is finding it useful to have and if not for directions, what other ways do you find it useful?
Yes I have a TomTom satnav/gps which I use in the car, and have used it when driving abroad, because it's got maps of the whole of Europe on it. I did use it in walking mode for finding hotels and places of interest when on vacation. I now use the maps app on my mobile/cell phone, for most travel because of it's faster speed and accuracy especially when walking. I also use it when travelling on buses and trains in foreign countries so I can see when to get off.
I was the last person on the planet to get a cell phone so I never had an "old GPS". I do get GPS in my phone and use it on rare occasions. Thanks, Terry, for the idea of using it when walking around to find places of interest on vacation…great idea that I never thought of. @Sheldon Scott , I dropped my iPhone in the pool so I bought an $80 Microsoft Lumina 640 that does everything an iPhone does including GPS. It's almost been a year now and it's going strong…looks like an iPhone too.
I use it all the time in Russia Lara, to find everything from ATMs to restaurants to museums, it's handy also for when you park your car using a find my car app. I guess it's also useful when you forget where your home is, just punch in home
I do, @Von Jones ... I refuse to own a smart phone so no gps there, nor does the car have it built in.... so very needed. I do wonder why the darn thing always tries to kill me in Jacksonville, though... on the bypass over the St. Johns River... tries to make a turn onto exits that aren't there... the car would go right into the river!
We seldom go places that are unfamiliar to us; but we can also use the iPhone or iPad for directions when needed. I have never used an actusl GPS except for the one on the iPad; so I don't have an old one either. Before that I used a map and figured out how to get where we needed to go with that. I am usually very good at reading maps, and was the designated navigator for our family for many years. Robin also uses her iPhone or iPad, and she has a place where it connects up on the car and she seems to love hers.
There are stories about drivers blindly following instructions from their gps In 2007, a 37-year-old German truck driver had his GPS guide him to a Swiss factory where he was to deliver his cargo. But instead of heeding the "no-entry" warning signs that should have deterred him, the driver followed the sound of the female voice until the truck ended up wedged in the cradle of a cherry tree. The truck was stuck fast, and the driver couldn't reverse. Local officials eventually had to chop down branches of the tree to get the truck out. More here
When we first used it we had so many erroneous directions given to us not knowing that we needed to update it. After I paid online for the update it we had no problems except when Johnny decides to go another way, 'Recalculating, recalculating...
We had a GPS, that we used quite often. There was a "Save" mode in it, so we'd simply "save" the directions of the place we had gone to. The old GPS was suppose to run/update by space satellites, but sometimes we'd really wonder how accurate those satellites really were. We got a special Media Chip for the GPS to use on our boat and, since we both now have iPhone 6's, we only use the GPS on our boat. Now, we use our iPhone 6 for directions and it's very accurate. If we turn the wrong way, it will automatically re-route us. We just love our iPhones!
@Lara Moss Do you use apps on the phone? I noticed it's a Windows phone. Back when I had a Windows phone, there were very few apps, so I wasn't able to use the phone as much as I'd have liked. I had GPS back when I had my smart phones, but back then, Sprint didn't work well down here where I now live, so the GPS didn't work well. It worked somewhat in Houston, but it was hit and miss. I don't travel outside of my little area much these days, so don't have a need for one, but I do have a few friends who still use theirs.