Garmin Quest

Garmin is one of the best-known names in the electronic mapping business, with dozens of GPS devices on the market catering to everything from avionics to marine applications to hiking to driving. Many of the company's products, such as the $1,750 StreetPilot 2660, are stupendously designed and enormously useful on the road.

The new Quest is Garmin's budget road-going model. It is pocket-sized, weighs only 5.5 ounces, and comes with a fairly generous 115MB of internal memory. Its rechargeable internal lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 20 hours of use. The Quest's flip-up antenna folds flat against the back of the device when not in use, and a home charger and in-car combination charger/speaker/mounting bracket assembly are included.

Garmin's MapSource City Select CDs provide map data, which is uploaded to the device from your computer via USB. The Quest is also useful for outdoor activities as well. What's more, the little unit is waterproof to 1 meter, in case you want to ford a stream or navigate your way out of your bathtub.

The Quest has some notable flaws: The memory is large enough to hold a sizable chunk of geography (depending on the region, you could easily fit a few states on it), but it isn't expandable-which is a shame now that 1GB SD cards are selling for as little as $75. Plus, the mounting bracket is awkward and small, so it would be a considerable distance from your eyeballs on some of today's windshields. And that is a particular problem for the Quest, because the screen is both small (2.2 x 1.5 inches) and not too readable (160 x 240 pixels).

The installation of Garmin's MapSource software was an obnoxious process, requiring a 25-character unlocking code for the maps, as well as a seven-character registration code. Choosing and uploading maps wasn't difficult, but we did find the MapSource's grid-selection technique a bit awkward. The entire island of Manhattan requires the user to select four different map segments.

Nevertheless, the upload went smoothly. Guidance along our test route was good, although we didn't enjoy fumbling with the Garmin's confusing multiple button controls (a touchscreen would have been very nice, but we suspect it would have added significantly to the expense). The Quest's antenna held its satellites well until we found ourselves in an urban area, where the tall buildings knocked reception out completely and rendered the Quest useless.

As we suspected, reading the maps on the Quest's feeble screen was all but impossible (especially since the map display is further crowded out by trip data), but we liked the turn-by-turn direction feature, which used the screen for pure text directions and accentuated that information with voice guidance. In the end, the Garmin gets high marks for value and for the fact that it works well, but it could certainly use a larger screen and a friendlier interface.