My new GPS Toy

I have been eyeing GPS systems for the past few months, but could never convince myself to spend the money on one since I have a pretty good compass in my head and rarely get lost. But I still liked looking at them because several models have a real-time traffic monitor and anybody who commutes in L.A. can appreciate this feature!

When I first moved to L.A. I subscribed to sigalert.com and would access this info from my phone. In the end, I canceled my service because I was paying a lot for cellphone internet that I rarely used and just checked the sigalert maps (free) before I left the house or work.

My sister noticed that I was eyeing GPS systems and has heard me complain about traffic a lot, so she bought me a Navigon 7100 for my Christmas/birthday present. It came in the mail yesterday and I was very surprised to get it!

I was not familiar with the Navigon since I had been eyeing Garmin Nuvi's and some TomTom systems. The Navigon 7100 is about the size of a PDA and has some nice features like FREE lifetime realtime traffic monitoring, and freeway lane recognition. The commute this morning was my first trial of the Navigon. It did a good job telling me there was an accident on the 101 and that I should take the next exit afterwards to avoid the traffic. However, it did not have information on slow/heavy traffic (just accidents) so it didn't swing me around the traffic. Instead, I drove around it myself onto side streets and this is where the Navigon did a good job and a bad job. It recognized small streets really well and had no problems telling me the shortest route (distance wise). On the other hand, it had me doing frustrating traffic things like turning left onto really busy roads and driving down roads with a lot of stoplights.

In general, I like it so far. Let's see what the evening commute is like...