Garmin nüvi 885/885T 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Speech Recognition
Features
- Sleek, ultra-slim design fits in a pocket; High-sensitivity GPS receiver for fast satellite lock
- Pre-loaded with City Navigator NT maps for North America, including more than 6 million points of interest
- Speech recognition allow you to speak menu options and keep your eyes on the road; Bluetooth-ready for hands-free use of compatible phones
- Features text to speech for spoken directions with real street names, MP3 player, photo viewer, multi-destination routing, “Where am I?” and “Where’s my car?”
- NOTE: Model number on the box is 885T because the traffic receiver is included; however, the model number on the device itself is 885 as the “T” in 885T refers to the additional component
- Visit Garmin.com to get the latest firmware updates for your nüvi to keep it current and performing at its best.
- Dimensions (W x H x L): 6 x 3 x 6 inches
- Weight: 1 pounds
Garmin nüvi 885/885T 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Speech Recognition3.6135265700483207
Portable GPS NavigatorsGarmin nüvi 885/885T 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Speech Recognition
Good features but freezes a lot
The 885T was an upgrade from my previous Garmin StreetFind. The 885T has all the features that I need, and have been pleased with the way they work.
Unfortunately, the 885T freezes. A lot. Both before and after doing all the software upgrades. It’s virtually certain that it will freeze every 100 miles or so. The only way to re-animate it is to physically remove the battery and replace it. At highway speeds this is not a safe operation to undertake. When the 885T re-boots, the destination has to be re-entered and then you get the navigational aid expected.
That’s a big trade off against the rest of the good features. I’ll have no choice but to try other brands and models before buying again.
This is my fourth Garmin, but no more
I have used Garmin products for many years now.
Started off with the Garmin 2720. Excellent little unit, the screen a bit small but worked perfectly. My next unti the Garmin 885. It had the bad habit when you went into “Points of Intrest” the unit would freeze up. The only soulution would be to remove the back cover, take out the battery and reboot the unit. This unit was stolen from my house, and I replaced it with the Garmin 855. This G P S had the same problem as the 885, only worse. I sent it back to the factory, it was repalced with another brand new unit, and it did the same thing, freezing up. Got tired of this problem, sold it on Ebay, and when back to which I thought was the better uint, the 885. Bought my self another 885 hoping my problems would end. WRONG. The unit did the same thing. All the updates were done, same problem. I have given up on Garmin and now purchased a Tom Tom which for the moment like very much. Soooooooo, sorry to say I would not recommend the Garmin products. Customer service was great once you go to talk to someone. I was on the phone for over an hour waiting for tech support.
Garmin 885T GPS
Great product and very fast shipping. This product is easy to use and very mobile. It can be switched from vehicle to vehicle with ease and can also be used anywhere in the world when purchasing the mapping software to go with it.
Nuvi885T
This Garmin Nuvi 885T replaced a Garmin Street Smart C330. The larger screen was a pleasant upgrade from the Street Smart. The Nuvi can pick up GPS in your house, so now I don’t have to be outside when I’m planning trips the night before. I like the Nuvi’s size, graphics, features such as direction uploads from Google Maps or Mapquest, which comes in handy when the Garmin can’t find things that either site has listed. Now for the negative things: The volume is ok but I can’t hear the instructions when I have the radio on, a movie on, or even the windows down on the highway. My Street smart could talk to me over all that noise. The battery on the Nuvi lasts about 2 hours at the most. I used to be able to go about 4 hours on the Street Smart before I had to get the car charger on. So I now drive with the car charger on all the time, I need it anyway to get the MSN Direct to work. MSN Direct has a few gotchas. I happen to live in an area where the signal for MSN Direct is weak so it doesn’t start working until I move a few miles from home. Then it takes an hour or so to update all the information. Traffic, weather, gas prices,etc. Also beware MSN Direct goes offline on Jan 1, 2012. I don’t know what will happen to this feature after that. [...] doesn’t even sell the “T” model any more with MSN I think because of it. Better off getting a “T” that uses FM for traffic.
Tracking while driving I thought was a bit better in my C330. I find it trying to “catch up” to where I really am. Previewing and lane assist is a neat feature, something the Street Smart never had. The maps that are out there for Nuvi are not as up to date as my C330’s is. Street names are not up to date and I keep searching but there are no updates for the Nuvi’s maps at least not for North America.
Would I buy this Garmin again? Yes but not with the MSN Direct, since its expiring and I live in an area where it works sometimes. The extra $100 was not worth it.
I’ve yet to use the voice recoginition. You can save another $100 for a model that doesn’t have it.
Great choice
The Garmin Nuvi 760 specs were just what I was looking for. I bought refurbished to get the low price. It came with all the goodies of a “new” unit and works perfectly. The bluetooth phone system, a feature I especially wanted, works very well, but was a bear to set up. Most of the problem was in the phone I wanted to use which was not on the choice list. (Nokia 6650) Problem had to do with voice “tags” which neither Garmin nor Nokia spent adequate time explaining. (hey, LOTS of people are new to this stuff!!). Once the tagging was done, things started working quite well.
Car charge plug & docking station
I have had nothing but problems since getting this unit. The car charger plug keeps popping the 3A fuse in the wire, Several phone calls to Garmin have not solved the problem yet. I’ve changed several fuses, then they sent me a new docking station which didn’t solve the problem and now they are sending me a new plug in wire.
Note: part of this wire is an antenna to pick up the MSN signal.
Garmin 885T…Simply GREAT!
I will admit upfront this is my first GPS so I have nothing to compare it to. That being said, I don’t know how it could be any easier to use. The speech recognition is great. I can listen to directions and still keep my eyes on the road. I would agree with some of the reviewers that said it would be nice if it gave you the upcoming turn information a little more quickly but I found it sometimes depends on how fast you travelling prior to the turn. Speaking an address instead of typing it in is just awesome. It recognizes my instructions almost perfectly. I use it everyday to find customer addresses in really far out places and it has gotten me right there everytime. I don’t understand the reviews complaining about the volume. I hear the voice responses just fine. Turn down the radio!! It did perform very slowly one morning but I just took out the battery and replaced it and it started back up just fine. I have had it for almost 2 months and it has performed almost flawlessly. I highly recommend it, especially for those who would like to have a gps but are afraid or hesitant to try the technology. The unit is very user friendly and the screen is nice and big and bright. I know MSN traffic is ending in 2011, but I bought the unit for it’s gps capabilities and for the speech recognition and voice activated entries and for that it is unbeatable. Buy it. You’ll love it too.
We like it
I think this is a good product. The screen in particular is a pleasure to view. Its minor problems: It’s a bit slow to react and sometimes the time given before a turn on a highway seems a bit short. That’s about it. Overall we are very satisfied. You do have to get some experience with it before you can use it with ease and enjoy all of its features. It is quite good and something I would recommend.
Why overpay for factory-installed navigation?
My wife bought a Garmin nuvi 285WT which she absolutely loves, and which is a great bang for the buck, since it was about half the price of my nuvi 885T. However, after reading various reviews, I opted to go for the upgraded 885T unit with voice recognition. This worked really well right out of the box with minimum effort required to learn how to talk to it. It also beats having to keep reaching out to touch the screen, which is distracting while driving. This, with the Bluetooth hands-free capability, makes it a really neat and user-friendly unit at a very reasonable price. You do have to speak clearly and sometimes you have to repeat a command and you can’t have the radio blasting when you talk to it, but it is surprisingly easy to use. My wife and I both bought the lifetime map upgrades, which I also recommend.
Should I or shouldn’t I
Works well most of the time but sometimes gets confused. Has told me to go certain ways which were impossible or just downright wrong.
Garmin GPS are great
This is my third Garmin GPS i bought to myself (the others are with my wife and my dad now). It’s really easy to work with it, very intuitive.
Unit freezes, speech recognition not good
Got this as a gift. The speech recognition is a great idea, but it does not work unless the car is stopped or moving slow as road noise overcomes it. The unit freezes often. You have to take out the battery and replace to get it going again. The battery charge indicator does not work well. Sometimes it shows the battery 3/4 charged and at the same time a low battery warning comes on and the unit will die. The battery runs down VERY fast. I would not buy this again.
GPS Plus
Very helpful on travel and well as local trips. Easy to learn to use with lots of options.
Nuvi 885T
The 885T is a great product right out of the box. The initial startup instructions were not complete and specific and it took a while to get the initial download of updated maps to work. A couple more sentences would have eliminated 45 minutes of frustration. This is in no way a critizism of the product, just the instructions.
BH
Screen froze one too many times
This was my 3rd GPS purchase (see my other reviews) and I hoped for the best but. . . it didn’t do much good on two back-to-back business trips to New Jersey in finding local eating and shopping points of interest in the middle of a huge suburban area. Screen froze a couple of times over the course of a week. Then when I missed a turn driving back south to Maryland the Nuvi routed me west across NJ to Pennsyvlania and kept displaying an unbelievable “time remaining” for the trip home of 7 hours! when it’s at most a 2-1/2 hour drive. The screen finally froze for the last time and I was on my own getting the rest of the way home. Fortunately my navigation was better than Garmin’s and I was home in 3 hours. Returned the unit to Amazon for a refund. I am now very happy with my Magellan Maestro.
Great GPS, especially for the price
I just totaled a car with GPS and Bluetooth pre-installed. We found a nice used version of what I’d just ruined for about $4K less than the insurance gave us, but it didn’t have any of the extras my old car had had. We figured that, for $4K, we could add them after-market. After doing tons of research, I’ve actually figured out how to do all of that for far less than the dealer was going to charge. No big surprise, there, as you can imagine!
Using this GPS navigator is almost intuitive, it’s so easy. Good thing, too, since there were limited instructions enclosed with the one I bought. I don’t know if the package I got included everything they normally include, but finding instructions was as simple as doing a couple of quick Googles, so it’s not a huge deal that the instructions weren’t as detailed as I would have liked.
The thing that attracted me most to this GPS was the Bluetooth feature. Bluetooth is the reason I bought this particular model, and that part is a bit tricky for me right now. It worked fine before I set it up to go through the car radio. I did that because the volume was difficult to hear with my radio off while I was driving. As the mother of two kids under the age of 6, I figured I wanted to be able to crank the sound if need be. The problem I’m running across right now is that the person I’m calling can’t hear me when I’m using the radio. I’m still working on that problem, though, because I’ve heard that buying a microphone will help with that and with the echo my callers hear of their own voices. Once I do that, I’ll update this review. That might be all it takes.
Even without using the Bluetooth feature (and I’m sure that’s User Error on my part), this is an excellent GPS. So much better than any other I’ve used in the past. I guess that’s what makes me so determined to figure out what I’m doing wrong with the phone feature. The maps are excellent. I’ve yet to experience being told I’m on an ‘unnamed road’, even when I’m in my little subdivision. I’m not afraid of this GPS steering me wrong, as others in the past have so often done.
Very Poor Reliability, Terrible Battery Life, Frequent Freezes
I purchased this at the end of August 2009. I immediately downloaded and installed all of the updates. The unit was trouble free for exactly 3 months. Then it started freezing midway through directions. Rebooting helped, but lost all of my settings. Now it reboots exactly at the point that it gives me the first direction on the route. The battery life is awful, making it completely useless to use for walking directions. At most I have received about 1.5 hours of battery when it isn’t being actively charged. It occasionally hangs up when searching for POIs but I assumed that was just because the search is so large. Now I think it is probably just that the unit is defective. Garmin customer service is terrible.
Regarding MSN, I purchased a lifetime membership just before all of the problems started and then promptly found out that they are discontinuing it. I wouldn’t be too upset about that if the optional FM transmitter weren’t so ridiculously expensive. Now that I have a replacement unit it doesn’t really matter because the $99.00 MSN subscription is not transferable to the replacement unit.
I am a fairly technical person and have a lot of “gadgets”, this is without a doubt the biggest waste of money I have ever spent on a piece of technology. I would have not thought about using a smart phone as a GPS as I prefer the size and other features of the stand alone unit, however since Garmin is apparently not concerned about either their customers or the quality of their products I will be exploring using a Droid for this function.
garmin nuvi 885T 4.3
We love it, it’s a great product.
But we wish it had an internal am/fm radio, since when you use the FM transmiter in order to receive directions through the car speakers your car radio is turned off. Unlike on original factory navigation systems in all cars you can listen to the “regular” radio and receive directions at the same time.
It would be a simple addition to the garmin nav system oprtions and it would make it more like a factory system.
Other things that bugs me are the on/off switch, just don’t like how it operates and the microphone is not very sensitive so you will have to add an external mic.
But besides that it’s a great unit and it does what they promise it will.
good product/bad seller
I’m sure that if this product had been “new”, as ordered, it would have been wonderful. However, the seller chose to ship me a used item which had obviously been returned by someone else. It did not work. When I requested the seller ship me a truly new one, I was told they were out of stock, but I was offered a $20 discount or a 3 year extended warranty. Lot of good either of those would do on an item that didn’t work. I was finally given return shipping instructions, and an e-mail assuring me I would receive a full refund. That was a month ago and I still have no credit on my account. Amazon, you’ve taught me a good lesson. From now on I’ll buy my stuff in person.
This GPS Rocks! Voice Activation Actually Works!
This is the best value out there, bar none!
PRO’s:
Voice activation that actually works, and is practical to use!
Great accuracy & re-routing
MSN Direct Services are OUTSTANDING!
FM transmitter
Music Player
Photo viewer
Line output
Great car-mounting setup
Good bluetooth connectivity
User-changeable battery
Lane assist with junction view
Unbelievably low price for what you get
4 GB of internal memory, and also has a micro SD slot to add more memory! Garmin’s so-called “latest & greatest” NUVI 1690 only has 2GB of internal memory)
CON’s (none are show-stoppers)
MSN Direct services going offline on January 1, 2012, and reception is dependent on FM signal strength in your area
Cannot find a way to display the number of miles remaining to the destination on the map screen (can view it with one touch to get to the trip computer, however)
Internal speaker should be louder
Bluetooth appears to be limited to hands-free calling, and does not play telephone audio through my bluetooth stereo (I am still experimenting with this, so I might be incorrect about this one statement)
Garmin has discontinued this unit, but I cannot understand why
The pros far outweight the cons on this unit. I REALLY HOPE that Garmin produces an add-on to allow you to access NuLink services on this GPS after MSN Direct goes offline. I could use this GPS forever! I have owned 2 other GPS units before this one, and the 885T is the one to own! Why has Garmin discontinued it?