Review of the Garmin Streetpilot C550 GPS

When I first started RV'ing full time, one of the first things I found I really needed was a good GPS. I needed it to help me locate some of the more out-of-the way parks, but that wasn't the only reason. Where it was most useful was in navigating around town when we stopped. In our travels, we decided to visit places we'd never been before or had only been rarely. Finding our way around town became much easier once we had a GPS.

The first GPS I bought was a Garmin Streetpilot C550. It turned out to be a great investment. It has plenty of memory, Text-to-Speach capabilities so it speaks street names, Bluetooth to attach to my cell phone, and the interface is simple and intuitive. It didn't take me long to decide it was a good fit for what I needed a GPS for.

The first nice thing about the Streetpilot is its simple interface. When you turn it on you're presented with 2 main choices ... Where To? and View Map. You touch Where To? and you now have 9 choices. One feature I really like is the Go Home button. Each time we stopped, I simply programmed the GPS that this was now "home". Then, as we traveled around town, all I had to do was tell the GPS I wanted to Go Home, and it took me right back to the RV. That's a nice feature when you've wandered around a strange city all day and have no clue where you are in relation to the park you're staying at.

Another great feature is the 6 million points-of-interest (POI) already programmed into the GPS. Want Mexican food tonight? Just touch the Food, Hotels... button and search for what you want by type of food, fuel, banks/ATM's etc. These POI's are great, but they were a bit lacking in the RV Parks & Campgrounds. Garmin lumps RV Parks and Campgrounds into the Lodging category and there aren't that many of them. Unless you know the name of the park, they were difficult to find even if they were already in the GPS.

Fortunately, Garmin built the C550 with lots of memory and the ability to load custom POI's. That was the primary reason I started compiling the Ultimate RV Parks & Campgrounds Directory. I was a bit frustrated with what was available in the GPS. I looked at other RV Parks Directories and didn't find any that contained anywhere near all the RV Campgrounds in them. Many of them were good, they were just lacking in completeness. Others had more parks, but their accuracy was not all that great. So, I drew on my professional knowledge of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and computer databases. The result was the largest RV Campgrounds Directory available anywhere - and it's still growing. I was using it when we traveled, and giving it to a few friends at first, but my friends told me I was crazy not to sell it.

The other feature of the C550 I use a lot is the Recently Found list. Each time you use the GPS to navigate to a location, it stores that location in it's Recently Found list. Then, all you need to do if you need to return to that location again is press the Recently Found button and there it is. The GPS keeps the 50 most recently found locations handy for you to return to.

Of course, no product is without its shortcomings. The things I found a bit lacking in the C550 were the lack of a coordinates display and its inability to reset its own time zones when travelling. The C550 doesn't give you a display of the Latitude and Longitude of your current location. That's a bit annoying. Fortunately, Garmin fixed that in the Nuvi line. If that's important to you, you may want to look at the Nuvi instead of the Streetpilot. I'll be reviewing a Nuvi later, so check back.

The other annoyance is the fact that the C550 can't reset its own timezone. That seems a bit ridiculous, especially since it is a GPS and always "knows" where it is. You'd think it would know when it crossed into a different time zone and would reset itself accordingly. Unfortunately, that's not the case with the C550. You have to manually adjust the time zones as you travel.

Phil & Karen King are full time RV'ers. They travel 12 months a year and have extensive RV'ing experience. They are the founders of CoolRVToyz, a web site dedicated to bringing the latest, and coolest gadgets to the RV lifestyle, including The Ultimate RV Parks List & Campgrounds Directory, the largest, most accurate and most complete camping Campgrounds Directory available. Best of all, it's fully downloadable into your favorite GPS or trip planning program.

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