[osidak]

I came out of a Garmin GPS V and while I loved it the limited memory (19mb) and serial only connection to load new maps drove me bonkers. Takes nearly 2 hours to load 19mb of maps and that doesn't even cover half of NC. Route recalcs took forever as well.

I strongly considered the Garmin Nuvi but I found it impossible to justify spending $450 + for the unit when the Mio c310x cost less than half and did everything the Garmin did. I just don't have that much excess money.

The Garmin is a little nicer when keying in address as you do not have to input a city first but the mio gets around this by allowing you to input a zip code. The Garmin uses Navteq Maps and the Mio and most other GPS' use Teleatlas.

The Garmin is limited to what the factory allows you to do. The Mio is hackable and with a little time you can change the menus to what is more pleasing for you, you can load other software (movie player, nav software, games, ect) and in general you can customize it.

For the money (mine at least) there was no question the Mio beat the Garmin hands down.