Product Description This is a refurbished GPS. Refurbished generally means that the unit has been returned to the manufacturer, who brings the navigator back to like new conditions. Some GPS may contain cosmetic blemishes. Garmin's nüvi 260 combines the thinprofile and attractive price point of other nüvi 200-series GPS with directions in real street names. As with all nüvis, you get Garmin reliability, the fast satellite lock of a high-sensitivity integrated receiver, a slim, pocket-sized navigator with a gorgeous display, detailed NAVTEQ maps that lets you search by name for more than 6 million points of interest like stores, restaurants or hospitals, and an easy, intuitive interface.
Amazon.com Product Description This is a refurbished GPS. Refurbished generally means that the unit has been returned to the manufacturer, who brings the navigator back to like new conditions. Some GPS may contain cosmetic blemishes.
Garmin's nüvi 260 combines the thinprofile and attractive price point of other nüvi 200-series GPS with directions in real street names. As with all nüvis, you get Garmin reliability, the fast satellite lock of a high-sensitivity integrated receiver, a slim, pocket-sized navigator with a gorgeous display, detailed NAVTEQ maps that lets you search by name for more than 6 million points of interest like stores, restaurants or hospitals, and an easy, intuitive interface.
Which nüvi is Best for You?: Click here to see a quick, simple comparison of features for all Garmin nuvi GPS navigators.
The nüvi 260 comes preloaded with maps for U.S., Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, and features an ultra-slim design.
Text-To-Speech The text-to-speech feature of the nüvi 260 means that device automatically calls out street names (saying "turn right on Main Street" instead of "turn right in 200 feet."). This feature lets drivers keep their eyes on the road while navigating through busy traffic and tricky roadways.
Smart, Powerful Design The nüvi 260W is built with a high-sensitivity GPS receiver for extreme accuracy, as well as an SD card slot for storing your media and additional navigation tools, and a USB interface for loading data. All this is wrapped up in a package that measures 4.8 x 2.9 x 0.8 inches (W x H x D) and weighs just 6.6 ounces. The nüvi display is touchscreen-enabled, making it a cinch to control the device with your fingertips. A rechargeable lithium-ion battery provides up to five hours of battery life depending on use.
Garmin Lock Garmin's patent pending theft prevention system that disables the unit from performing any functions until the user types in a specific 4-digit PIN or takes the unit to a predetermined secure location
Navigate with Ease The nüvi 260 comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded City Navigator NT street maps, including a hefty POI database with hotels, restaurants, fuel, ATMs and more. Simply touch the color screen to enter a destination, and nüvi takes you there with 2D or 3D maps and turn-by-turn voice directions. In addition, the nüvi 260 accepts custom points of interest (POIs), such as school zones and safety cameras and lets you set proximity alerts to warn you of upcoming POIs.
Important note about map updates: Due to our high volume of sales, almost every Garmin portable GPS navigator sold by Amazon.com will come with the most recent map version. If you ever do need a map update, you can purchase one from Amazon.com at our Garmin Store.
Easy To Use Interface Garmin's interface is a key to their success and one of the things that makes their devices such a pleasure to use. Simple controls and sub-screens make it easy to enter or search for destinations and get data about your trip.
Beyond Navigation
Navigation is just the beginning. nüvi 260 features travel tools including JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, calculator and more. It also comes with Garmin Lock, an anti-theft feature, and configurable vehicle icons that let you select car-shaped graphics to show your location on the map.
This device is compatible with optional content plug-ins available via SD card, such as the Garmin Travel Guides and Garmin SaversGuide provide detailed data for attractions and information on nearby merchants offering discounts, so you can customize nüvi for your travel needs.
Garmin has also added the ability for customers to add custom points of interest (POI’s) from third parties such as school zones and safety cameras.
Browse your stored pictures with an easy-to-use JPEG viewer.
nüvi 260W accepts custom points of interest (POIs). View larger.
Trick Your GPS Ride
Custom vehicle icons let you ride in style, at least inside your GPS. See more icon option
Like all nüvis, the 260 supports configurable vehicle icons. These fun, customized car-shaped icons come in a variety of colors to add a personal touch to your vehicle's position on the map.
What's in the Box nüvi 260, preloaded City Navigator NT for the continental U.S., Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Canada, vehicle suction cup mount, vehicle power cable, dashboard disk, and set up and go guide.
Note: Like most USB Mass Storage Devices, the nüvi is not compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me.
Initial ReviewOctober 30, 2008 Wayne P(Arkansas) 15 out of 15 found this review helpful
I received the nuvi 260 today. It was every bit as I expected. Not a scratch on it, protective film over the touch screen. I powered it up, connected it to my laptop and went through the registration process. In doing so, Garmin pushed the updated software to the unit. It also came with 2009 maps. I then took it out for a test drive and it performed flawlessly. It says refurbished product, but it looks and acts like new. No regrets here, I would buy a Garmin refurbished unit again. I saved lots of money vs a new product.
No one compares to GarminDecember 20, 2008 J. Riquelme(Space Coast, Florida) 7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is my 4th GPS. First one I bought was a Tom Tom, I had it 1 week and took it back, it was bulky, the mount couldn't hold the unit up (drooped when I hit a pothole) and it didn't have Text to Speech. My Second is a Garmin NUVI 350 I had now for 3+ years, my 3rd is a model that comes built-in to the landrover. I love my two Garmins over the Landrover built-in. They cost thousands less and by far are superior in the human interface design.
I like the 260 over all the other models because it has the same superior "guts" of the higher NUVI models for tracking, but without all the nonsense like mp3, picture, bluetooth, FM traffic blah blah blah. I bought it for my daughter and she has all that other stuff satisfied by I-Pod, cell phone...etc., and doesn't need the higher costing NUVIs and the unit itself to be burderned with features she isn't going to use. I bought it for a paltry $150...WOW! I am too embarrased to tell you what I paid for my original NUVI 350 at Circuit City 2005. But in my defense, GPS car units were very pricey back then. Now the field is very competitive and prices are a 1/4 of what they used to be. Truly a must purchase at these new price lows.
Pros:
- Thin and portable , easily fits in pockets and purses.
- Intuitive menu design, you can start using right out of box without studying the manual. The wife will love that.
- Text to Speech voice guidance is the best. When you are needing to make your turn and there are 4 streets bunched close together, a voice prompt saying "turn right on Smith Road" is far superior to a beep prompt or a "turn right in 500ft" like the Tom Toms.
- The destination selections are smart. Categories are well populated. You don't have to set the town to start searching for that nearby Arbys. It immediately scans from your position outwards. It does offer the option to select search in a particular town, somewhere along the way or at the destination itself which is a well used feature for us.
- Can run on battery or car charger.
- Cradle is excellent design. It has an easily engage/disengage design. The wiring snaps into the cradle so you just push release for NUVI and pop it into your pocket. It does have the option to plug directly in to NUVI if desired.
- USB connection and software is spartan but functional for updates and icon selectivity. Tom Tom's software is far superior, but in the end, your GPS in on you car for guidance 99.98% of the time and not on you PC playing around.
- CONS
- To return to the navigation map, you have to back out X amount of times of menus that you enabled, very annoying. Garmin should have a hot button to return you instantly to your guidance map from anywhere in the program. My built-in has that and it is used a lot. Garmin's design is more annoying than disfunctional.
- Battery will not last the 5 hours as advertised. I got 3 hours of use at best. So if you travel, don't forget your charger cable.
- My NUVI takes a while to "warm-up" from a cold overnight sleep. The screen will say some distracting statement like "Searching for satellite" which is untrue. The receiver modules in GPS units need time to "cook". Really not Garmin's fault.
- Garmin sells units that play MP3s. Unless you tie-in the Garmin to your car stereo using the audio cable patch cable, you will be greatly dissappointed using the unit's speaker for sound. It works fine for voice guidance but is completely inadequate for fidelity music listening. The same goes for bluetooth functionality.
- On start up, it displays the destination menu screen. I don't always use the garmin, but I would like it to go to map display on startup. A minor issue, since you can just hit the one button at that menu to get to map. My built-in GPS defaults to map and I like that feature over a constant menu displaying. This is a personal preference, and not a design flaw by Garmin.
Not a Factory Refurbished UnitNovember 1, 2008 dtb 5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Received the Garmin 260 today. When I tried to register the unit with Garmin the unit had been already registered. I called Garmin and found out the unit had never been refurbished by the factory. The label on the box stated, "Newly Overhauled". It appears that the unit is actually a "return" in a box labeled "newly overhauled". I called Amazon to discuss the issue but all I got from Customer Service was send it back approach. Not much effort to make things right.
Great Product - Poor Customer Service.
A GPS for the cost-consciousMay 31, 2009 J. Duska(Buffalo, New York) 10 out of 12 found this review helpful
After deciding to buy a GPS (in order to protect myself from myself -- I once got lost on my way to work), I started to do some due diligence to pick a good unit. Price is not just an issue, but a serious issue for me, and even though there are GPS units to be had for around $50 or $60, I would rather spend $100 well, than to spend $50 poorly.
When I searched for popular makers, or when I searched for highly-rated models, the Garmin name kept popping up at or near the top of the lists. I settled on Garmin as the brand I would trust, and started looking for the barest-bones Garmin unit that had the features which were musts for me: color display (with which it would be a lot easier to discern different terrain features while driving), and TTS, or Text-To-Speech (audible prompts which call out streets by name). Other features, like photo viewing, MP3 play, &c., were unimportant to me, and doing without them would keep the cost down when choosing a model.
With price and feature considerations in place, I chose the Garmin nüvi 260 as the GPS for me. I also chose to buy a factory refurbished unit, rather than a brand-new one -- it enabled me to save $35, or about 25%. I will buy a refurbished item only if it's refurbished by the factory, not a third party, and if the maker is a good one. (As such, I've only ever bought one other refurbished item, a cell phone refurbished by the maker, Motorola. I'd still be using that phone, if my carrier hadn't changed the network, thus rendering the phone useless.)
I like the Garmin nüvi 260 GPS unit, considered solely on its merits as a GPS. I've tried plugging in friends' addresses from all over the USA, and it had no trouble finding any of them and mapping a route. I've not yet used it for cross-country travel, I've tried only to see if it could find things and map them. I tried plugging in addresses whose locations are already known to me, to see if the 260 would put them in the right places, or even in the right towns. I'm happy to report that the 260 appears accurate in placing addresses -- or at least as accurate as one might reasonably expect civilian GPS to be.
My exiting from the plotted highway route onto a parallel city street running some fifty or sixty feet east of the highway fooled the Garmin nüvi 260; it didn't detect that I was no longer on the highway until the street I was on veered me a little farther east. I suspect this isn't the 260's fault though. As I understand things, civilian GPS is deliberately kept inaccurate. In hindsight, I should have stopped the car, stopped the planned route, manually entered my new position into the unit and let it recalculate from there. No matter; as I say, it automatically recalculated a new course a little farther on.
The 260 enables the addition of a via point to a current route, which is to say, after it has already calculated a route from point A to point B, you can have the 260 alter the route to get you to your intended destination via an additional point C. This is nice if you have a change in plans while en route ("Honey, could you stop at the flower shop on the way home from the airport?"). Unfortunately, if you try to add another point D, the first via point will vanish: only one via point per route, please. It would be nice if you could add multiple via points, but I'm probably nitpicking. Unless you're driving a delivery truck, you probably have very little need for multiple via points.
The 260's TTS (Text-To-Speech) prompts are usually pretty clear, but it's driven by voice synthesis software which is imperfect. I used the 260's GPS Simulation mode to see how it would give prompts in different situations. In southern Ontario, Canada, there's a highway called the Queen Elizabeth Way, which is commonly abbreviated QEW. The 260's voice synthesizer pronounced QEW as "cue". It also had trouble with the Canadian abbreviation "Rte." (for "route"), pronouncing it as "R.T.E." On the American maps, where routes are abbreviated as "Rt.", the TTS synthesizer correctly pronounced it as "route". As you might imagine, the TTS has real trouble with exotic names. Here in Buffalo, New York, where I live, we have many Native American, German and Polish street names. I can't say I'm surprised the 260 couldn't properly pronounce Scajaquada or Tonawanda, these are names many non-Natives can't pronounce. It did surprisingly well with Polish names, nailing Paderwski, Sobieski and Kosciuszko! It had less luck with German names like Roetzer and Krupp. Again, this may be nitpicking, for in addition to the voice prompts, there are text prompts at the top of the screen. If the 260 says something that makes you say "Huh?!" just look at the prompt bar at the top of the screen. This is a good thing for TTS GPSs to have, until voice synthesis technology is perfected. Mostly, the 260 does a good job of pronunciation. It handled names like Niagara, Elmwood, Washington and Galleria with no trouble.
The 260 has trouble acquiring satellite signals in the concrete canyons downtown, but this too is, I believe, a common lament with most GPSs. Curiously, if I acquire the satellites before entering downtown, the 260 can hold the signals until I reach my downtown destination. Just let me take it inside my office building though, and ze jig, she is up. I'll be unable to reacquire until I clear away from the buildings downtown. Go figure.
It is convenient to store certain destinations and hard-to-find addresses, thus personalizing the unit's map according to one's own needs. You can use these for navigation by going to Where to? and then Favorites. The 260 shows a list of favorite places you've saved, which you can touch on the touchscreen interface to set as destination or via point. The Favorites list works something like a bookmark list in a web browser, so the items there are listed in a sort of hodgepodge, and the 260's software seems to attempt to order them by frequency...I think. It seems like the order of the listed items changes, and finding a particular one can be a bit of a hunt. It might be best to keep the Favorites list small to minimize this.
I was disappointed in the kit sent along with the unit. There should be a USB Type A Male to Mini B (5 Pin) Male Cable to enable connection to a PC. PC connection is necessary for updating maps and installing new icons and such, and thus a proper USB connection cable is also a must. There is none in the box, you'll have to get one separately. There should also be an AC adapter for in-home charging. There is none; instead, there's a car adapter. There's nothing wrong with a car adapter, you'll want one for long drives. Without it, your GPS unit will run down its battery before your trip is done. I think, however, there'll be very few people who'll feel comfortable leaving their GPS unit unattended in the car while it charges up, but that's what you'll have to do if you don't also get an AC adapter along with the GPS. Garmin does not include one. Garmin does include a suction-cup mount, but really, I get the idea suction-cup mounts are falling into disfavor because of the evidence they leave behind when you remove them. The visible circular mark left on a windscreen or dashboard is like a neon sign saying to bad guys, "The owner of this car has a GPS unit, who knows what else they may have? There might be cool things stashed somewhere in this car." If you use a suction mount, I hope your glass coverage is good, and you haven't left anything at all valuable in your car. Also, the suction-cup mounts hold best on the windscreen glass, which puts the unit in your line of sight. This is illegal in a couple of states. In other words, the suction mount is probably not the best Garmin could've done.
I've found Garmin's website to be a pain in the neck. It requires a software download to enable upgrades and updates to the 260's software, and when I try to download icons and such from [...] directly into my 260, my browser crashes. I'm using the Firefox 5.0 browser with WinXP. This is a stable browser on a very stable operating system, but Garmin manages to crash it anyway. It also crashed Internet Explorer 6.0 (which I never use anyway). [...] does enable downloads to a PC, which you can then copy to the 260. It's a small nuisance, but it works.
Finally, Garmin includes a small, skimpy "set up and go" guide in the box. It's a sort of quick-start guide to get you up and running with a minimum of fuss and bother -- a goal it accomplishes. However, the devil, as they say, is in the details, and there, the set up and go guide falls far short. If you want to know things like how to reset the unit, how to download custom POIs or additional maps, you'll need the owner's manual, which is not included in the box. You'll have to go to [...] to download and print the owner's manual.
So -- all in all, though the total in-box kit supplied with the unit left me disappointed, I like the Garmin nüvi 260 GPS unit in and of itself. It lacks the bells and whistles so many GPSs have these days (and really, all that stuff is just marketing to sell new GPSs to people who already have one), but it has it where it counts most: it will get you where you're going.
Nuvi 260 RefurbishedFebruary 26, 2009 P. Peters(Cleveland, OH) 4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I've been following the various GPS reviews for a while and decided to take the plunge with this model. I figured at $119 the price was right and since it was factory refurbished with a one year warranty, there was not much to loose. Ordered on 2/6 and it arrived 2/18 via USPS. For all intents and purposes this looks like a never-used product. I registered the product and tried to see if it would offer the 2009 maps. It did not, so I called Garmin and after sending a proof of purchase they released the 2009 maps. As stated previously they take about 3-4 hours to download and install. I've not had much of a chance to use the product but it's very intuitive to navigate. I like the TTS function that gives ample warning about upcoming turns. The unit only comes with a car charging cord but I found that the charger for my cell phone (Motorola Razr) fits perfectly. The cable for my digital camera can also be used to connect the nuvi to my pc for downloading maps. If you are in the market for a GPS, this is a pretty painless way to get started. Of course you can always spend more for a brand new model.
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nüvi 260W accepts custom points of interest (POIs). View larger.
