Garmin Mobile XT at Samsung i550w

I’ve been testing the new Garmin Mobile XT application recently and honestly, it’s not too shabby. Garmin’s been in the GPS biz for, well, as long as I can remember, but this is their first attempt at a mobile app. Previously they’ve focused mainly on the dedicated in-car and handheld devices. Garmin Mobile XT will cost you $99 and comes with all necessary maps, as well as access to the Garmin Online features.

The app ships on a 2GB microSD card, with micro-to-mini and micro-to-SD adapters in the package as well. The app is tied directly to this memory card, which can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it. Garmin informs me that there is also a version available on DVD that will allow you to put the app on any memory card (or internal memory, in the case of the N95 8GB or N81 8GB), though this version, for some reason, is $40 more. I’m told it has to do with how the map data is licensed from Navteq. Shipping it on the microSD, however, is good because it makes installation dead easy. Seriously you stick the card in your phone and go. Installation is automatic, and I think alot of folks will find that really appealing.

The main screen of Garmin Mobile XT is very user-friendly, with really few options. The first button, “Where To?” is really self-explanatory, and lets you either navigate Home (I really like having such quick access to navigate home) or enter an address or use the POIs and all that. Below that takes you to the map view, and then Tools, Settings, and Exit. Really simple. In this screen also, the top left corner shows the strength of your GPS signal, which I really like.

When entering addresses, you start with the State, and enter in each part of the address bit by bit. You can search for partial city and street names, which makes things really easy, though there’s no T9 support. For instance, if I’m navigating somewhere in North Richland Hills, well that’s a long city to type out with multitap. However, I can put in just ‘North R’ and Garmin Mobile XT will return a list of cities matching that, from which I can select. This really makes things easy. There is also support for navigating to a contact’s address, but I was unable to actually use this, despite having the address correctly formatted in my address book. The application kept wanting me to manually type in the details.