Good at being a pathfinding and point-by-point navigation tool, not as an actual map. Their completely broken treatment of street and POI labels makes the product very annoying when trying to preplan a journey, get yourself oriented in a place you don't know, or evaluate alternative routes.
Especially when driving. Super thin, low contrast lines with hardly any labels at a weird angle make trying to read the map while driving super frustrating.
I have a Garmin unit mounted on my car windshield that comes on with the ignition, and the user experience is just so much better. The route lines don't blend in with the background and it has large labels that are actually readable. The low angle of the 3D map actually lines up with the view through the windshield, which compresses a decent amount of roads into a small space. Even the spoken directions are better (I've used British English Daniel for years, and I rarely notice when someone speaks in a British accent).
I don't often set a route, so it mostly functions as an always-present map, which it does exceptionally well. I especially like the banner at the bottom that shows the road I'm currently driving on and the banner across the top that shows the next cross street.
Honestly, any of them. They're all good. The one I have is three or four years old, and it still works as well as it did when it was new, except for the battery (but it stays plugged in so that doesn't matter). I could easily keep using it for 3–4 more years if it keeps getting map updates.
Every few months I plug it into my computer and leave it to update for a few hours (it's a one-click process), but I think some of the newer ones have Wi-Fi so they can auto-update.
It really depends on what features you want. I've found the voice commands to be quite handy. It has a hard time understanding some addresses, but for stuff like "go home", "turn down the brightness", "navigate to the nearest Tim Hortons", it's great. I wish mine had a built-in dashcam like the newer ones, but they're not cheap. Mine has Bluetooth as well, so it can get more frequent traffic updates from my phone (instead of through the FM receiver), as well as take speakerphone calls.
It's pretty much a single function device, which is perfect. I never have to mess with it, it's always there, and it leaves my phone free for audiobooks or for me to use if I'm in the passenger seat.
Yep! It's gotten worse and worse to browse as a map over the years. The earliest AJAXy versions were probably the best for that. I think they intend Earth for that purpose (they moved the great geo photo feature from Maps to there, for instance) but it's really heavy for that purpose, and the interface is clunkier.
It seems like another victim of Google's optimizing their products for one common use case and neglecting others. See also: search.
It gets worse every year. Like every 8 mos they add an extra thing you have to touch/click past to actually see the map. But maybe that's just the mobile app...
