Garmin nuvi 765T

In the past several years, I've had a built-in nav, a TomTom, a Garmin 660, and now a Garmin 765t for a couple of days. Having had so many, I felt I knew what I was looking for in upgrading from the 660 to… the 765t. Things I've observed that are awful: 1) ADVERTISING. Ads pop up when you use the traffic feature. This is lousy, and makes me feel annoyed and cheated, but what's worse is that one popped up when I arrived home when I wasn't using the traffic feature. An ad for Hyatt...really?? Get off my screen. 2) CALIBRATION. Just the worst! I found out how to recalibrate the screen and have done it three times and it just gets worse every time. When I try to type in a new state, it brings up the new country option from below no matter how high up I tap. When I try to type in the name of a street, it chooses the letter next to it and if I try to compensate, it still won't choose the right letter. Unusable! 3) DEAD PIXEL. Out of the box, it had a dead (always red) pixel. Nice. 4) POINTS OF INTEREST. My Nuvi 660 always found the points of interest I was looking for reasonably quickly. The 765t does not. Either it doesn't find them in its results at all (where the 660 had), or I get the hourglass spinning until I give up. 5) REDRAW. I bought this unit above the voice activated unit for a few reasons and one was that reviewers had said that it had quicker redraw, which I knew I'd find valuable when I decided to override its directions and make it recalculate. Unfortunately, the redraw even when doing things like changing the basic settings is not smooth and quick, as I'd expected. I haven't had much time to use the unit for travel, so I can't comment on the wonderful features like lane assist and 3-D buildings that I bought it for. I can just say that this was not at all what I was expecting given the decent experience I'd had with my 660. The 660 lacks some basic features that I want - like telling me things in time or showing me which way I will be turning before I actually need to make the turn - so I really felt like this was a good buy, but it's going back.

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Hocked off my old Nüvi 250, picked up this 765T. Primary reason was for bluetooth phone integration. Traffic notification & lane assist end up being much more valuable than bluetooth, although the 765T's… bluetooth functionality works great with my Moto Razr V3M. The 765T definitely gets satellite lock much quicker than the 250 did. It still has a little trouble locking on in downtown Detroit, amidst the skyscapers. But it does lock on before I get out of downtown, whereas the 250 had to reach Michigan & Third before it knew where it was. Love the "send to gps" integration with Google Maps--very useful feature. One bummer of upgrading GPS units is that I lost all of my favorites in my 250. Maybe Garmin will one day stop worrying about unlock codes & user-hostile stuff like that, and worry more about giving me an easy upgrade path.

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We have used our 765T for over a month and find it helpful and entertaining. Even though I don't agree with a few of it's route selections, I find it amazing that it knows so much. On many occasions it… has saved us much time. On familiar routes you could experiment with it's selections to get a feeling for how it thinks. Understand that with the information it has built in and the traffic info it receives you may have to make a practical decision which route to follow. This becomes apparent on a freeway when it receives a message that there is heavy freeway traffic so it suggests you get off the freeway and take a frontage road parallel to the freeway. The frontage road may have multiple signals and it's own heavy traffic but the GPS doesn't know it. This is not a good decision but you can see why the GPS suggests it . You are better off staying on the freeway, even if you are moving slowly. Also there can be some recent street changes. You have to evaluate for yourself and you may have to override a selection. On one trip across San Francisco heading west on the Bay Bridge to a house in the Sunset District this unit directed us on a brilliant selection of streets I would have never chosen and in a very quick amount of time. I know San Francisco fairly well and I am amazed. In many other locations we are not familiar with it has also worked great.

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Received the Garmin Nuvi 765T one day afer ordering. Had owned a TomTom before. Right away, I loved the Garmin. The way it attached to the dashboard was superior to the TomTom whose suction cup kept… letting go, causing the GPS to fall. I also like the way the Garmin goes on and off as the ignition goes on and off. So far the Garmin has been 100% accurate; its traffic notification has enabled me, on occasion, to avoid becoming ensnarled in traffic jams. Yesterday, it took me to one of my "favorites" one way, then gave me a much better return route than I had used before. I haven't tried the Bluetooth yet. Just bought a new phone and will try to match it up with the Nuvi this weekend.

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