Garmin is the only way to go ---I have a Navig8 and I am sure the poor woman (or the man if you choose to get really lost) in this little box is off hem mind.... I often have to turn it off as I find myself second guessing my own knowledge of how to get to a familiar place.... I found that the garmin software is the most jacked up... and that's world wide.... I borrowed a friends when I went to Belgium last year to watch the F1 GP as Spa... nevegot lost - and believe me it wouldnt be that difficult as everything is in ... well not English. all I had to do was download the European software which didnt cost that much....

Cheers for now...

I bought my husband a Tom Tom One XL this spring when he got a new job that required travel through cities he'd never driven in.  It works well if he just enters the right destination....sigh. It has a nice feature where you can choose from a drop down list of cities, then pick different destinations such as airports, hotels, etc, and you can just scroll through and pick the one you want and off you go.  I like that bit because you don't need to know the address of the airport in order to get to it.  If you pass a turn you were supposed to take, it recalculates your directions.  It has a handy feature you can subscribe to if you're a city commuter -- it will constantly download info on traffic, construction, etc., and re-route you around the traffic jams ahead of you.

One thing I wish it would do is change the orientation of the map on the screen.  It always has North at the top -- I know, I know, that's where it's supposed to be! But if you're driving and just have that half second to glance at the map, it would help if the spoken instruction of "turn right" didn't appear to be a left on the map. I haven't used the GPS unit myself yet, but with a basic map, if I'm heading south I turn it upside down, memorize the look of all the turns and the streets, and off I go. 

On the negative side, this GPS unit sticks to the windshield with a suction cup -- which doesn't always stick.  And apparently it is illegal to attach a GPS in that manner in California, something to keep in mind if you are travelling there. And my husband reports that once, in the middle of the bald prairie, with no intersecting roads for miles, the GPS did suddenly tell him to turn right. He decided against that. According to the info that came with this unit, you can update and correct your maps, and even download other peoples "Corrected" or edited maps. No idea how to do that, though.