Disappointed With Garmin City Navigator NA v7.0 Update

Just out of curiosity, am I the only person that is disappointed with
the new 7.0 update of Garmin's City Navigator North America? I
started out with v5 and then updated to v6 at a cost of $150. I was
very please with version 6 and most of the time it did pretty good
route calculations. Version 6 said it had over 5 million points of
interest. Of course there is always a lot of problem with POIs due to
store openings and closings, but it did come in very handy when
traveling.

Well, I paid another $150 for Version 7 update since Garmin was
advertising it as having almost 6 million points of interest. Now
that I've updated to Version 7, I can't imagine it having more POI
since the map data is smaller then the older version. For my area, a
lot of Post Offices and other POIs have been removed. Since I do a
lot of camping, I've also noticed a lot of the campgrounds in version
6 have also been removed from version 7. So from my viewpoint, I was
expecting more POIs, but it sure looks like there are fewer. I guess
some of the categories could have gotten extra POI and they removed
some from other categories, but I don't like being led to believe that
it increased from over 5 million to almost 6 million when that doesn't
appear to be the case

Now to really irritate me, I've tried doing some simple routes around
town - nothing more then 25 miles. Version 6 did a pretty good job of
routing. Version 7 is taking me the long way around on some of the
expressways to get to the same destination. When it recalculates,
instead of realizing there is a shorter and faster route, it keeps
trying to route me off the expressway and head back to the incorrect
route that it calculated. I've tried using version 6 again and it
does the correct route calculation.

At this point since there doesn't appear to be more POIs (at least not
the ones I use) that Garmin advertised and the very poor route
calculations, I sure wished I didn't spend the $150 to upgrade to the
new version. I sure don't have a lot of confidence in the new version
as being able to calculate a good route. I don't know if Garmin has a
return policy, but I'm going to be contacting them for a refund since
the version 7 update is not what I expected, doesn't calculate good
routes for my area nor does it appear to have what they are
advertising with the number of points of interest.

Anyway, I'm curious if anybody really likes the new update and thinks
it's an improvement over version 6 or are there other people that
think they wasted their money.

James

Uh oh. I was eagerly awaiting the City Select v.7 CD (supposed to be a
free upgrade for me because I just bought v.6 in June) because I was
quite unimpressed with v.6 which i think is inferior to my old
Metroguide v.4 in many ways. I don't know how City Select might differ
from City Navigator (all those confusing Garmin names), but this
doesn't sound good.

Using Garmin's on-line viewer of City Select NA v7, I checked a few
locations where I know v6 is deficient. V7 did not address any of the
missing roads which incidentally do show up in Metroguide 4.

Garmin's claims for v7 are listed below:
Now with verifed data for Alaska!
Full Coverage of the US, Canada and Puerto Rico!
Nearly 6 Million updated Points of Interest!

Apparently the principal changes were verification and update for
Alaska and to update the points of interest data.

So, it looks like I'll not be springing 75 bucks for a v7 update, but
will continue to use Metroguide 4 for bicycling and CS v6 for driving.
Major roads, particularly highway interchanges are more up to date with
CS v6, but lots of geographical features and dirt roads which do show
up in MG 4 are missing. Thank goodness MG 4 is routable on a GPS
receiver.

For someone in Alaska it may be worth the price.

As far as the points of interest go, yes, there are issues with CS v6,
but it serves my needs quite adequately. Lets see what happens for v8.

It sure would be nice if they could just take all that data from
Metroguide v5 and incorporate it into City Select. But I'm sure that it
isn't poassible because the data for each is licensed from different
sources.

Bob

Metroguide 4 was far bet

Metroguide 4 was far bet