iQue Garmin 3600 and City Select South Africa

Overall Impression After flying for two days from the U.S. through Europe, we were tired and jet lagged. The last thing we wanted to do was drive around a strange city famous for its high crime rate, in an unfamiliar car (and on the opposite side of the road). Everything worked out like a charm thanks in great part to our newest travel technology, the iQue 3600 from Garmin. Before leaving the U.S. we purchased the City Select South Africa software. It allowed us to navigate accurately and easily through South Africa’s two major cities, Cape Town and Johannesburg, their environs and the Kruger Park in the North.

The iQue’s voice instructions were excellent and simple to follow with commands like “in five hundred meters, turn right” or “off course,” when we took a wrong turn. Even night driving was a breeze. It took a little getting used to the distances and the imagery on the IQue screen. In the case of City Select South Africa, we found that only urban areas were well mapped. Whenever we strayed from the cities, the detail in our maps faded, but waypoints and major roads were still a confidence builder. For us, the ideal combination was to have one person drive while the other focused on the iQue commands and images.

A dashboard antenna, purchased separately, allowed us to hold the iQue comfortably on our laps while navigating and driving around. A cigarette lighter charger fueled the iQue so we didn’t have to worry about batteries running out (this was also where the external speaker for the navigation was located). Battery life and power consumption when running the GPS were issues for us in remote parts of the bush. If the iQue ran completely empty of power, all the information in its memory would be lost and have to be reloaded from the laptop. We brought the Laplink USB cable which was invaluable for charging and synchronizing with the laptop.

The iQue’s organizer software was practical and efficient, allowing us to store and manipulate contact information and keep it synchronized with Microsoft Outlook. Documents to Go allowed us to view and manipulate Word and graphic files. The full color screen offered a high resolution and plenty of details for our purposes. We found the 3600 an ideal travel tool, especially in far away and unfamiliar places. It was fun to be able to mark waypoints across remote Botswana and determine our position and altitude. We look forward to continuing to use the iQue organizer and its integrated navigation functions in the future at home and for trips.

Applications PowerOne Personal Calculator and trial editions of: Astraware Game Pack, Documents to Go, DataViz Mail, Palm Reader, StarCaddy, Vindigo, WorldMate. We upgraded Documents to Go to take advantage of its capabilities to handle many tyupes of Microsoft Office documents.

Battery Internal Lithium-ion battery. A cradle was included to charge the iQue

Display : 2.16″ x 3.24″ (54 x 81 mm), 320 x 480-pixel, high-resolution color with virtual Graffiti™ area

Included Autopack with iQue 3600, USB recharging cradle, black protective cover, A/C power adaptor, Palm Desktop set up CD, two map installation CD’s, Map Source unlock code sheet, two Graffiti stickers, Quick Reference Guide, and Set Up Guide The package included a 256 Mb Secure Digital (SD) card to hold additional maps and documents, larger SD cards were available.

List Price Garmin: $643 and City Select South Africa: $233

Manufacturer-Distributor: Garmin

Release Date August 2003

Size 2.8″W x 5″H x .8″D (72 x 128 x 20.3 mm)

Support Though we had some trouble with the website using the mapping software unlock codes, but technical support responded quickly with an easy workaround. There was furthertroubleshooting information on the Garmin website

Technology And Built-In Devices Global Positioning System, GPS, antenna, display, speaker, microphone, touch screen, Palm OS 5.0, memory: RAM– 32 MB, processor– Motorola 150 MHz, input device: stylus, touch-screen, scroll button, wireless: IrDA

Type Of Product Palm Hanheld Organizer with GPS (global positioning system) integrated capabilities as well as U.S and South Africa map software

Warranty One year from date of purchase with an original or copy of the purchase receipt from the retailer where purchased. An online auction purchase confirmation was not acceptable for warranty purposes. Garmin had the option to use rebuilt (or new) parts when repairing a product under warranty at their sole discretion. It was unclear whether the owner would be notified which type of parts were used following a warranty repair. Owners wishing to have their products repaired under the warranty were required to mail them to Garmin directly and pay for the cost of mailing. Out-of-warranty unit owners would be subject to a minimum $150 repair fee and the cost of shipping.

Weight 5.7 oz

Features : 200 MHz processor, Palm OS 5.2.1, integrated Que technology , with Garmin GPS and mapping software, flip-up integrated GPS patch antenna speaker for voice guidance commands, MP3 player, message playback, built-in 32 MB of memory useful to download map data, and ARM 9 processor. There was an integrated SD card slot to provide additional non-volatile memory.

City Select South Africa integrated trip and waypoint management functions, detailed maps of select cities and towns in South Africa, map detail included motorways, national and regional thoroughfares and local roads with attributes such as turn restrictions, speed categories, displayed points of interest such as food and drink, lodging, gas stations, and hospitals, automatically created point-to-point routes in MapSource.

Other We loaded the worldwide base map, which provided major political boundaries, rivers and large highways. We were able to load the entire South Africa City Select and the U.S. maps around Florida into a 256 Mb SD card. A much larger card would be required to load all of the U.S.

Countries Tested : U.S.A., Botswana , South Africa and Zambia

Date Of Review November 2004

Number Of Days Tested Six months

Would You Use This Product Again? Yes