I had an opportunity to watch Garmin nüvi GPS equipped with CN maps while travelling by a car some time ago. I was curious about how good those maps are compared to OpenStreetMap. By my observation the Garmin maps are worse. They tried to navigate us through fields (despite unpaved ways were disabled in setup) or through a dead end street. Sure, OpenStreetMap contains errors too, but it has been making great progress at least in our country. While I wasn’t much certain about using OpenStreetMap for car navigation a year ago, I’ve completely relied on it this year on my occasional trips, even when going abroad. And of course I fix errors and apply changes I discover. I’m not going to use proprietary maps for navigation anymore, despite their prominent support by proprietary GPS devices. OpenStreetMap is a nice free product and it’s worth to contribute to it.
Well, we’ve got a nice free map. Now I’d like to have an outdoor navigation with a documented interface so that OpenStreetMap can be used on it without problems. What do you think, Garmin?
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