Customer Reviews
Actually a review of v7
I ordered v6 after the cutoff date for a free upgrade. Nice. :-)
The upgrade came in the mail in a reasonable amount of time and installed over v6 with no problems. Also nice.
I used it on a first-time ever trip to New York and it kept me from getting lost (and confused) more than once. Definitely worth it.
BUT (and there's always a but), there's so much detail in the maps that I couldn't download as much as I wanted to my eTrex VistaC (24 Meg of RAM). Granted, New York has a lot of stuff to download, so the maps take a lot of memory. But I have the same problem with San Francisco Bay Area maps.
The other gotcha' (and a more serious one) is bad/outdated information. For example, in my home town City Select v7 still shows a Coco's restaurant that's been CLOSED for nearly five years. But it DOESN'T show a Taco Bell that's been in business right across the street for at least 10-15 years, and is still open. Go figure . . .
I don't want to sound too negative. Overall, a fantastic product. But the first thing I learned about maps in Boy Scouts was that all maps have mistakes, somewhere. And this map is no exception. So don't always expect to find that gas station or restaurant where your GPS says it is. But I'd buy it again, in a heartbeat.
garmin city select v6
I use this with my Garmin 76cs gps system. It basically works great. I was able to make a 1500 mile round trip & find restaurants, stores, etc. At home, it is not as comprehensive as on-line yellow pages and the like; it doesn't have everything there is in it. But it is a LOT better than pulling off the road in the middle of east LA and hoping to find a bathroom!! I never got lost, even with my 13-year-old operating the gps. (It did take a few hours of playing around to get familiar with, but after that it is pretty easy to use.)
Works well but...
The main complaint I have about City Select is that it costs way too much. Sadly, Garmin forces you to buy the MapSource series of maps if you want to load maps on to your GPS. This also poses another problem, Garmin only supports Windows. As a Mac user this is a pain for me, while there is some great Mac GPS software out there I am forced to use Windows (lucky I have a old Windows machine laying around) to transfer maps to my GPS because Garmin will not allow others to develop software to transfer maps directly to a Garmin GPS.
That being said, CitySelect works well. It is very handy to have detailed maps on your GPS. I took it on a road trip recently and it work great. Having points-of-interest also helped out when looking for food while on the road.
I did have some issues with auto routing. When I was getting close to home I decided to check it out to see if it would give me the route I was already heading but it insisted that I turn around and go back the other direction to pick up the route it had picked. It would have got me home, it just would have taken me forever.
Conclusion: City Select is over priced but necessary especially if you have a Garmin 60c/cs, 76 series or Rino. These have the most memory of Garmin's handhelds, if you have a GPS with 8 or 16MB of memory I wouldn't bother, you wouldn't be able to load very many detailed maps.
Don't forget if you order version 6 to go to Garmin's website and order your free update to version 7. My update came about a week after I ordered it from Garmin.
