Canter Bridge

I’ve owned five GPS units. The Sony NVU73T is the best of them. I picked mine up at a Radio Shack in a hurry when my Garmin fritzed out like those old 1960s black-and-white pictures of what would happen to your TV if the Soviets snuck one through our defenses onto, say, an unsuspecting Kansas City.

Googling ‘Russians drop atomic bomb’ has not yielded any news reports but I sure am glad I listened to the Seattle techie at the Shack who said ‘this is a new product and it’s better than anything you’ve ever seen.’ He was right.

Let me talk specifics:

The graphic are crystal clear and unusually helpful. A complex warren of over- and underpasses is always a challenge to a brisk driver. The Sony gives you the leg up that comes with clarity and eliminates a 5% margin of guesswork.

The ‘Dual-View-3D Junction Guide’ is a superb innovation. As you approach an exit–whether one you need to take or one you most definitely don’t want to make the mistake of taking–a split screen view pops up that shows you exactly where you want to go and exactly where you don’t. This has saved me many misjudgments already.

The Sony redraws quickly and lets you know *exactly* when to make your turn by saying ‘NOW … turn left …’. I’ve found my other GPSs too sluggish at times for the kind of quick decisions that congested urban driving in unfamiliar cities requires. The crisp precision of the Sony eliminates another 15% of room for error.

The unit is thin and light, as one would expect from a product line that’s maturing.

The Sony is not without its issues. I often wonder *who* is going to give serious attention to fixing the inadequate mounts that GPS manufacturers saddle us with. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be Sony. The windshield mount on this unit is among the least effective I’ve discovered. You can remedy this by purchasing a third-party clamp-and-weight unit. But you shouldn’t have to.

The Sony does not fill in addresses by electronic guesswork like other brands are frequently capable of doing. You’ll need to type in every last letter of the address if you want to get there, which–presumably–you do.

I’m developing a theory that the good folks at Sony have decided not to be early to the market with various gizmos, concentrating instead on bringing out the state of the art unit as a second or third generation. They’ve done it with their GPS. Highly recommended, imperfection notwithstanding.