Nextar ME 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator

I purchased this GPS unit around August of 2009 at Target. Target had the units on sale for $89.99 at the time. It wasn't the best GPS unit in the world, but I was pretty happy with it. It did always get me where I wanted to go, however I often felt that my girlfriends Garmin took more sensible routes.

My feelings about this unit changed in November when daylight savings occurred. We fall back an hour but the GPS failed to do so. Instead the little Nextar unit can't decide what time it is anymore. It jumps around from between 2 hours ahead or behind the actual time and never stops. Me calculated ETA is never correct from this point forward. There apparently is no way to set time manually and turning off auto GPS time doesn't help. Nextar's solution of a hard reset also failed to do the trick.... great! I opted to hold onto the GPS unit a little bit longer as I needed it for a 5 hour trip, which is when another problem popped up.

Towards the end of November the sound started to go on my GPS unit. At first the voice simply cutout or got scratchy every once in a while. As time progressed the sound the voice commands became incomprehensible and then sound stopped working all together on the unit. Nextar's solution? A hard reset, which obviously failed to fix the unit.

The unit is under warranty and Nextar agrees to take it in for service. I think everything has gone quite well and am pleased with the service I received over the phone. A few minutes later I receive an e-mail from Nextar detailing how to send the unit back to them. The e-mail asks that I include a money order or cashiers check for $25 with the unit for return shipping and handling!!!!! So, I have to pay to ship it to them, and I have to pay them to ship it back to me? What kind of warranty or service is this? I've dealt with a lot of companies and none of ever asked that I pay a return shipping fee on an item in warranty. Realistically, it would cost me $4-$5 to ship it to them, but they need $25 to do the same? That's more than 1/4 of what I paid for the unit in the first place.

I ended up taking the unit back to Target and exchanging it for a Garmin. Lesson learned. I would have considered a Magellan except for the fact that Target doesn't carry that brand.

I'll admit the Nextar wasn't all bad. It does have a lot of advanced features for the the price. You would pay a lot more for features like lane guidance and multi-point routing if you bought a Garmin or Magellan. However, I don't feel the Tele-Atlas maps are as good as the Navteq maps after now experiencing both. What could be a decent little GPS is very much let down by the horrid service Nextar provides and the apparently poor build quality or quality control of the company.

If you were to ask me, I'd recommend pinching a few extra pennies so you can pick up a Garmin or Magellan GPS unit.Get more detail about Nextar ME 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator.