Anyone Tried Metroguide V4? Is It Worth It?

[+tirediron]

Pretty much convinced myself that I am going to pick up a new GPSMap60CS (boy, that took a lot of arm-twisting ) and am wondering if I should spend the extra $140 for Metroguide V4? I have Version 2, but it's only slightly better than useless. Is V4 worth the money to upgrade? Thanks!

[+Geosophers]

You can try it for yourself here. The level of detail is very impressive. It's not 100% accurate though . It says that my house when I lived in N.-B. is next door to a plumbing store. This is not even close to being true. However, because of the street level detail, if I had $140 to spend on software, I would go for it.

Edited November 26, 2003 by Geosophers

[+John144]

I recently took advantage of a generous offer from Garmin to buy Metroguide V4 at a very reduced rate, because I had just bought version 3.01 a few weeks earlier. I have not explored it in its entirety yet,but I have noticed the following:

 

- V 3.01 only had detail for Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. V4 has excruciating detail for every city I have looked at (Calgary, Halifax, Dawson City, to name a few). It has every road I have been on in the vicinity of Horseshoe Valley/Orillia, where I take my kids on vacation often. I am impressed with how much detail is available across the country, and for this reaosn alone I am very happy I got the new one.

 

- The tradeoff for this is that the maps in V4 take up a lot more memory. In V3.01 I could have all of Toronto and surrounding cities (anywhere I would likely go caching without much advanced peraration) in my Legend with its 8MB. With V4 I don't think I can even fit all of the megacity of Toronto, so I will need to plan ahead a bit more. If you're planning on one of the new 51MB units, you'll probably be fine

 

- One nice surprise is that the 2 versions coexist just fine within MapSource on my PC. It appears that I have my choice to use either, or perhaps even mix & match map sections from both (I have not actually tried this yet!). I had expected V4 to just replace V3.02 once I installed it, but they appear to have distinct product codes. That makes it very easy to do side by side comparisons of the detail, and if it does allow mix/match on the GPSr, more flexibility in what I choose to download.

 

- Because the new maps are from a different source, they are not in every case better. My impression is that overall they are much better, but I have already noticed one case where the new ones are missing info available in the old ones. So there may be significant areas where this would matter to you. Check out Garmin's preview viewer to make sure for areas you care about (but be patient, because the online viewer is designed to be slow and annoying, so you won't really rely on it for anything more than a quick look-see).

 

I'm jealous about your plan to get one of the new GPSmap60CS units. I just got my Legend in August, and it'll be a long while before I can justify an upgrade!