Garmin Mobile XT Review by Ankur Patel

One of our readers, Ankur, has kindly put together an awesome review of the Garmin Mobile XT app for the E71x.  Enjoy!

By Ankur Patel

I thought I would write up a quick review of the Garmin Mobile XT Version 5 which I have been using for the past couple months on my ATT E71x.

Installation

The Garmin Mobile XT comes on a micro SD which you just insert into the phone, and it automatically installs itself.  The program (with North America Map) is about 1.5 Gigs, and therefore runs off the Micro SD card, and not the phone.

Using the Program

The program launches with its warning screen which you have to agree to. Then, you get the simple two selection "Where to" and "View Map" buttons. The function of the Garmin program is almost the same of any Garmin GPS device, so you can check its functions other places.  As a quick run down:

"Where To" Section

1. Home - Quick way to define going home 
2. Address - Address is input as state, then city (but not needed), street, and number. If no city is entered, then the street address will be shown for all matching cities in that state.
3. Point of Interest - This has categories such as food, lodging, fuel, attractions, shopping etc.  Each one has subcategories as well.  While searching you can search near current location, destination, near a particular city, and along the current route. One thing which is great, once you pick a POI, you can see it on the map, set it as destination, and also a small "call" button, so you can call the POI right from the phone.
4. Google Search - This have the same search features as POI, but it does Google search for it. It works MUCH faster for results than the POI search. I don't know why.  It does have an issue with "along the current route" where is does not seem to work. For POI for fuel, it will also go on Garmin Online, and show you current gas prices. Naturally you need Internet connection for this search and gas prices.
5. Recent Finds - History of addresses you have previously looked up.
6. Contacts - This feature looks up your contacts in your E71x address book, and you can call any of the contacts from it, and if your have addresses for the contact, you can set it as the destiniation. This is a great intergration of the feature.
7. My Locations - Saved locations.  It does not let your place it into categories.
8. Cities - This displays the cities nearest to the current locations.  Really don't know when I would need this.
9. Intersections - Set the navigation to intersections.
10. Where Am I - This displays for current location, nearest address, nearest intersection, and easy buttons to fuel, hospital, and police stations.

Settings Section

Besides the normal features; sound, display, etc.  Here are a couple of notable features:

1. The backlight can be constantly on, off, when navigating, or when speaking (the one i use).  Even with the backlight fully on, I get about 3 hours or so, which i find amazing.
2. There is no text to speech.  (Turn left in 500 ft) and not (Turn right on Main St.)

All the other settings are typical Garmin (routing preference, what to avoid, etc.)

Garmin Online (requires Internet connection)

1. Traffic - Checks the nearest traffic incidents.
2. Weather - 5 day forecast for any address, and current location.
3. Fuel Prices - Well, fuel prices.
4. Flight Status  - you can select the airport and check on departing and arriving flights.  It goes about 3 hours ahead of time.

The Navigation

In the "View Map" display, the top line will show the turn distance, type of turn, and the next street to turn on. The bottom line shows current speed, and the arrival time. (2:00PM), not how much time remaining. Click "5", and you can see the list of turns. and clicking the D-pad will show you a "turn" map, which will display the turn in 2D, and the details of the turn in large font, while speaking the turn.

Navigation Traffic

If you have place avoid "traffic" in the setup guidance, each time you set the destination, it will go online and find the traffic incidents, and calculates the route with that information.  I am not sure how well the traffic info is, that’s just due to lack of testing.  The main thing is that it only looks at the traffic when creating the route, NOT while you are on the route. so there is no updating in the traffic automatically.

Actually Using the Navigation

I have been using it for the past couple of months, and went on a trip to Canada.  On this 2000 miles trip, I found the GPS system to work very good.  It gave me great directions, which seemed to the fastest possible way to get to the locations (every GPS has its flaws, but this one was very tolerable).  The POI database seemed good too. (I only used it a couple of times).  The speed of recalculating a missed turn was pretty fast.  The only part where I found it to be slow was in the "non Google" POI lookup, where it would sometimes take a couple of minutes to show any POI search.

The map was able to accurately display the street, and was large enough on the E71x that you can glance at it quickly enough to not be an issue while driving. It does state the next turn as well.

The only other small issue which I have found with the Garmin GPS is that it sometimes takes a little while for it to get a GPS lock.  If I have done a cold start (for example, if I turn off the GPS, drive a long distance, and then turn it on again, or the next day), it might take up to 3-4 minutes to get a lock on the GPS signal.  This is much longer then I would like.  From a warm start (turn off the GPS, and turn it on again in the same location), it will lock on pretty fast, usually less then a minute.  If you do a cold start and the car is moving at the same time, then it can take a long, long time, typically more than 10-15 minutes to get a lock. At one cold start I had to stop the car, and get a signal before driving again.

Once the signal is locked though, it does NOT lose it quickly.  I have not had any issue yet while I am driving with a locked signal and I randomly lose it.  If I am in a tunnel, the signal does come back very fast as soon I get out of it.

I personally find it an excellent replacement to my current GPS system (Mio), and the convenience of having it on the phone is great!