Tips on Buying the Best Car GPS For Your Budget and Your Needs

The best car GPS for you might not be the same as the one for your next door neighbor. Although GPS systems all do essentially the same thing, they come with a ton of different features and prices. Choosing the best one for you is a matter of understanding the market. It's also a matter of understanding what your needs and wants are.

This article is going to help you sort all of that out. That way, you'll be able to buy the best car GPS for you and your needs.

Let's start by talking about who makes these things.

If the market is any indication, the best companies are Garmin, Tom Tom, and Magellan. They control almost 90% of the car GPS market. Garmin is the top dog with 50% of the market share. Tom Tom and Magellan each has about 20% of the market share.

I know there are a number of other manufacturers of car GPS devices. Personally, I would stick with the bigger companies.

Now, we'll talk about the features and about how much various GPS's are going to run you.

All car GPS systems can show you where you are and tell you how to get to where you're going with voice instructions. For the cheapest systems those voice instructions aren't going to include saying the street names, just something like, "Turn Right."

Also, your basic GPS will have pre-programmed maps and a pre-loaded database of common destinations, called Points of Interest, or POI's.

You can get a car GPS that can do all of this and a little more for less than $150.

Some good possibilities would be the Magellan RoadMate 1200, which sells for only $120, or the Garmin nuvi 200, or the Tom Tom One, 3rd Edition.

Of these three entry-level devices, I would go with the Tom Tom. It offers more features for the price.

Common features you have to pay more to get are: Bluetooth for hands-free calling, multiple point routing so you can enter more than one destination in at a time, and real-time traffic and weather updates.

You can get all of this for less than $350!

Probably the best car GPS on the market (at least Consumer Reports thinks so--and so do I!) is the Garmin nuvi 760. It can do all of the above and more.

If $350 is too much, then think about the Magellan Maestro 4250. It offers most of these features (and more) for only $250. In the under $300 price range, I think the Maestro 4250 is probably your best all-around deal!

But even the nuvi 760 is not the top of the market.

If you're looking for state of the art, cutting edge technology, then you'll be looking at Garmin only. Tom Tom and Magellan are just not competitive in this part of the market.

But if that's what you want, then you need to be thinking about the Garmin nuvi 880! At a mere $900 it can do everything except wash your socks.

What you need to do now is to get on an informative website where you can browse individual GPS's and check out their prices. That way you can find the best car GPS for your budget and your needs.

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