Has anyone got any experience of using Sat Nav in Perth. My wife has a bit of trouble with directions and she has asked if we could get Sat Nav. I will be working and I don't want to come home everyday and she starts telling me about how lost she got!!

Any info or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Don't know but would be interested about the same for Victoria, as my wife is the same.

Derek

Don't know anything about sat nav but if you always have your ubd or streetsmart with you it is hard to get lost

Lynn

You can get it TomTom have just released their little dashboard doo-dah all in one unit its about 1k$ I had tomtom on my PDA in UK its great. The GPS market here is quite mature - lots of taxi companies, delivery companies etc have them built in.

I thought Perth had just one road, in and one road out.... ;-)

For example
http://www.dse.com.au/cgi-bin/dse.st...uct/View/D4105


Go to Www.dicksmith.com.au and search for GPS you'll see a whol epage ranging from 888$ to 2000$

Yeah, I sold my PDA with Tom Tom on before I came out becuase there was no Oz version... bloody wished I had known, would have kept it.
Tom tom is very good.
Not hard to navigate here though after a while thanks to UBD...

Thanks for all the info so far.

The wife is Dyslexic which means that it's much harder for her to navigate than it is for somebody who isn't Dyslexic. We also have a 3 year old, so trying to navigate using a UBD whilst he is in the car is also a bit more tricky. Just trying to make sure that the first few months are not harder than they should be because she can't find her way around.

Anyway, will have a look at the links posted. But if someone has a particular GPS system that they can recommend then that would be useful. Will have a look at the TomTom ones.

Thanks

Try Navman, my friend uses it here and in Europe and thinks it's great. Turns out it's actually an Aussie company and the maps cover the whole of Australia(or so they tell me).

www.navman.com/go/aus/index.html

Yeah - 99% of the map says "proceed in the current direction, then turn left at the Sea"

hehehe

I wanted to get a TomTom when we arrived last year to help when property searching. They weren't selling here so I emailed TomTom who replied that in their opinion the Oz databases were not of a sufficient standard for them to sell GPS kits here. I bought a Navman instead and have not been pleased with it!

From what I have seen in reviews the TomTom is a far better bit of kit - and it has a battery too, which means that it doesn't switch off every time you start the car!

The Navman has all sorts of programming flaws: too numerous and random to list. plus, the comment on the databases rings true - I have several times driven through lakes without even seeing any water....

The unit is at present back at Navman being repaired (I hope) since the voice synthesizer quit some months ago (probably yelled at me once too often)

Can only echo this!
I bought a Navman iCN510 to use in my job driving around central London......what a pile of crap!
The touch screen has NEVER worked from day 1!! When it comes to finding the route in London....I generally have to spend in the region of 10 minutes sat on double RED lines waiting for a GPS signal so that I know which direction to pull off in!
Load of bloomin rubbish.........someone told me they are a KIWI company?

Ok since we're getting into user reviews

-Ive had Tomtom running on a dell AXIM X30h pda with a bluetooth satellite receiver . This was pretty good, sexy interface, able to map speed cameras and warn you about them etc. Pretty good piece of kit - but PDA operating system meant resets and reboots made it unreliable so I lost faith in it.

-Had tomtom on my new dell x50v with a wired receiver - same thing, kept hanging and losing it enough times that I got scared to trust it.

-before that I had Garmin Ique3600 integrated GPS/PDA - it was BRILLIANT it would never ever need resetting would always get me there, always had a signal was 100% reliable and accurate.

So there you go . I dropped my ique3600 in my briefcase and the screen smashed, thats why I changed it and went to windows based PDA's which are poo. They're great for diary mgt and viewing excel files but the OpSystem is poo and hang/sresets whihc you dont want to do on the hangar gyratory trying to see if you've missed your exit.

We have a built in Sat Nav in our car, doesn't work here in country WA but starts working as soon as we hit Mandurah. Works well in Perth , has warned us to stay away from heavy traffic, directed us though backstreets with no traffic, saving us minutes in just 10km trip. Would recommend it to anyone, though we weren't looking for one, just happen to come with the car...

Went for a look yesterday at both Tom Tom Go 300 and NavMan icn510. I felt the Tom Tom looked a better screen and felt more comfortable with that one but the NavMan was thinner and therefore much easier to carry if you were using it as a portable.

Going to have to wait before I get to Oz anyway as they all come pre-installed with UK maps and I would have to pay extra for Oz maps.

Wife loved them!!

I will trawl the net looking for some more reviews I guess.

From what I gleaned from reviews the TT was better at regaining track after being in a shadowed area.

Certainly the Navman would get very confused when driving through spaghetti junction sort of system: the display obviously locks onto the road (it's always in the centre of the road, which it wouldn't be if relying just on the signals) and when you drive over/under another slipway it seems to want to jump onto THAT one rather than stay on the correct one: you suddenly get the woman shouting EXIT NEXT LEFT!!! or some such. After a while you start to anticipate when it will try and take you off track, but then you are actually worse off than if you were just reading a map in the first place - not only are you driving but also watching the screen to anticipate when she'll try and get you lost and also having to keep an eye on the Gregorys!