I am in sales and travel thousands of miles a month. In the course of using different GPS brands I have found Garmin to be the best. I have 3 250w units and 2 260w. For the money the 260w is not worth it. Its only advantage is speaking street names which it murders the pronunciations to the point you get even more confused, for example St. George road comes out sounding like “San Orange Rone”, and it gets worse. The 250w is the perfect unit. If you don’t need a billion points of interest, bluetooth, live traffic updates, (BTW a separate subscription service), mp3 player, or 7″ screen in your NAV unit then this is the one. It is small, lightweight, strong battery life, (about 5 hours with contrast down), and inexpensive.

Read the full review here

It has a few quirks, but all in all, a very good and easy to use GPS. We recently used it on a 3700 mile trip and discovered all its peccadilloes as well as its advantages. The latter outweigh the former. An annoying feature is for some inexplicable reason the GPS will sometimes take us on circuitous detours that don’t seem to make much sense. Eventually you get where you need to be but a person familiar with the area would find it a bit strange. We love Starbucks, so the points of interest feature came in handy for locating them in unfamiliar towns along our route. Even so, we occasionally got routed to a location where a Starbucks didn’t exist. Just one of the mysteries of the GPS world, I guess.

Click here to get the full review

The first one I received worked out of the box, but stopped sensing the satellites after 2 days. I tried turning it off/on several times, tried several very open-to-the sky locations, and finally tried rebooting by pressing the reset button on the bottom, but nothing happened.

However, I found it so easy to use and better than previous models, especially at an attractive price ($300), that I returned the first one and got a replacement.

For the full review, click here

This Garmin nüvi 250W 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator is my first GPS unit. Having now owned it for several days, and with my wife and me putting it through its paces, I can definitely and honestly say that it is an excellent unit, one of which Garmin should be proud.

It is considered to be a “basic” GPS device.

This unit does the job, does it very well, and does it very simply.

It gets you there and it gets you back! You won’t ever be lost when you use this device.

That is the reason for which you purchase an item such as this. This particular unit functions much like its competition except that, from what I have read, it really works much better than most of them. And from my own experience with it I can say that I could not be more satisfied.

The nüvi 250W (as well as the nüvi 250) come pre-loaded with maps of all of North America, including Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. The nüvi 200W (and the nüvi 200) have maps only for the “lower 48″ states including Hawaii and Puerto Rico. While that may be sufficient for many (probably most) people, I think the 250W offers much more for a relatively small difference in price.

Get the full user review here