I've owned several handheld units mainly used when sailing unfamiliar areas. Recently my wife bought a Hyundai Santa Fe with a $1,750 combination stereo/XM radio/gps unit built in. I now keep a Garmin Nuvi in my truck and it is infinitely easier to use than my DW's fancy built in. As an example, the Garmin unit automatically changes the screen background color from white to black when it gets dark - the built in only dims the screen and you have to key in that change manually. The Garmin gives a much better representation of your vehicle progress and where exactly you need to turn. As I am frequently alone in the vehicle, having one that "talks" is important to me and the Garmin has a much larger vocabulary and more useful prompts. As we are both pushing 60, getting a unit with a larger screen was important to us - both in terms of seeing the screen and interms of inputting addresses, etc. so we spent almost $200 for our Garmin at Best Buy to get the big screen and wouldn't have it any other way. Particularly useful is the constantly updating "time of arrival" feature - returning from a trip to Ohio last week I was able to arrange to meet DW at a local diner and neither of us had to wait for the other to arrive. This may sound a little like a Garmin infomercial but I do have one complaint about the unit - it is so much better than the built in that DW frequently grabs it out of the truck to use instead of her expensive built in! - camp2canoe
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