anyone her have experience with a garmin ique handheld nav/palm pilot?

a friend showed me one with a car kit that looked pretty slick. any experiences to report?

I have a Garmin, purchased for hunting and sled trips in the great white north. Except in rare occasions, it is an expensive toy........Primary functionality is GPS, which can be had in many form factors. What form factor are you looking for?

i was hoping to use it as a gps for cars that don't have factory nav units. i don't know what a "form factor" is.

sorry for the techno babble..........The most common "form factor" for car mounted GPS devices is in map form with streets indicated. Does Garmin have such a product? Is the resolution what you need? My experience with the Garmin is that is uses a lot of battery power and the tracking screen is of real limited use. If they have a map overlay product, the quality of the map is the value proposition, as the rest of the functionality (IE; GPS) is a commodity. Whew, and BTW, this is my opinion, based on limited experience. That cover it?

i use a garmin etrex in my 951 and really like it. i use the garmin windshield mount in the lower left-hand corner of the windshield. HOWEVER, i really don't use it to navigate by - my main use is mainly as an information base: how far have we gone, how far to go, max speed, moving avg speed, overall avg speed, moving time, stopped time....stuff like that. it lets me navigate from town to town or to/from 'waypoints' that i've previously set. is it necessary for my day-to-day navigation, no - but do i like it? you bet. it does show me main roads, but most city streets aren't there on the base unit. i believe you can load it with additional, more detailed maps, but i haven't done so. the base maps are world-wide, tho - it has international borders, too. i have many waypoints marked in afghanistan - just for kicks. for navigation, i use mapquest....

I use a Garmin Street Pilot III with a beanbag mount. It is a bit unstable in the Porsche if I corner hard, but OK for hard braking. It has voice guidance and is better than most of the permanent installations I have seen. I plot out routes, waypoints, and select maps on my computer and download them to the GPS. The GPS can hold the maps for about 15-20% of the US. The Mapsource maps can be downloaded from the Internet to keep current and they know all street numbers and the phone number of nearly all businesses. The unit can run on batteries with a bike mount, and I have used it in the woods a few times even though the maps are meant for streets. I.e. not sure if I could load topo maps. Occationally I lose satelites in the city or with a lot of tree cover in the country, but it has been a very solid unit and I have come to rely on it to get to places I have never been. When I go off route, it recalculates a path (a bit slow) to the destination. The newer unit has a more powerful CPU and also has a touchscreen interface so there is less buttons. The screen has high visibility in the day and switches to night mode automatically. Not sure about the recent pricing, but it will be much less than ordering it as an option. i.e. less than $1000.

Do a search--this was very recently discussed-- Geoff.

Really like my iQue. Find the maps to be excellent and the voice directions very good. Much better unit than the factory unit in my X5

thanks mike--- you've confirmed my first impression. the battery shouldn't be a problem since the car kit plugs into the lighter