Nextar SNAP5 Super Slim 5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator Get it now!

GPS units need to do one thing: get you from here to there. The Nextar 5 does that quite well, with some bonuses I didn't expect in the price range as well as a few negatives.

First, the positives: The screen is huge compared to my last GPS. It's easy to read from anywhere in the car (especially great for my kids in the back seat that like to watch where we are) although it can get washed out in direct sunlight - though that's par for the course. It's also got built in batteries that allow you to unplug it and use it on foot for a while, which is nice, and an AC adapter for use outside of the car, also a neat feature.

The directions are excellent, even catching a U-turn around an island near my office that most miss. Getting off course and then re-routing is also incredibly easy. It has both night and day modes, which I liked, as it dims the display down so as not to be distracting when driving after dark, and you can choose between multiple display modes to suit your personal preferences.

So it gives good directions, has a great, large screen, and looks good - what are the negatives? First of all, it takes longer than I think it ought to to start-up and load the navigation software. That may not bother most people, but I didn't like it. Worse though, the touchscreen is not consistently responsive, causing me to hit a selection once, wait a few seconds and hit it again, at which point it registers both hits and goes past where I want it to. If also found the POI settings a big non-intuitive - I found it took longer that I thought it ought to to figure out exactly how to display the specific items I wanted displayed at any given time. Finally, for some reason my unit will not auto-set the time; something my other GPS units have no problem doing. There's a setting to allow it, but it says it's unable to do so. And when I manually set it, it would forget what time zone I was in every time I turned it off, which made the clock off by 5 hours every time I turned it back on. Weirdly, this behavior just fixed itself recently, and it now at least remembers the time zone.

Most of these issues are picking nits though, and with the exception of the time zone issue, which has apparently fixed itself, none are deal-breakers. The core functionality of the Snap5 has been fantastic, and for that reason I'd recommend it as a good and budget conscious alternative to some of the other GPS units on the market. Get more detail about Nextar SNAP5 Super Slim 5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator.