City Navigator S.E. Asia

blkphantom

blkphantom

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Feb 12, 2007
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Hi Everyone,
I am thinking about buying Garmin City Navigator S.E. Asia.For my next Thailand trip.
My question is anyone out there use it for Thailand?
I have read some bad reviews about this product.Any othere product work better in my Nuvi 550?
Thanks,Al
 
I believe that most people use the ESRI map, which you can buy in Bkk and Chiang Mai. Or, you can get a free map from OSM.

Having used both my experience is:

ESRI has far more roads, but very bad dirt tracks are shown as roads and so the routing can be interesting.

OSM map is more accurate in the country, but has less roads/tracks overall and is not as accurate and complete in Bkk and some other cities.
 
How do those compare to the City Navigator SE Asia map?

I'd read somewhere that the City Navigator is better in the North and maybe generally outside of Bangkok while the ESRI map is better in Bangkok.

For ease, I'd rather just download the City Navigator map from the garmin website and try to put it on a flash card myself, but I will be in Chiang Mai next week and I guess eaglegps could install the ESRI map in their store for me, right?

Maybe it's best to have both?
 
Have used both and find them both good for sealed roads in the North. Cannot comment for off road stuff.

The Garmin maps are "made" with the information supplied by ESRI with some of the detail removed so they can fit more countries on the SD card. For general riding around, I don't think that you will find any difference.

One area that I used the extra detail of the ESRI maps was in my pre planning. When I was picking lunch stops for the group I brought up last November, I would pick the town or village that I thought I would be in around lunch time and then zoom in to a 50m scale on my Zumo and troll slowly through the town or village. At that scale, most of the bigger eateries are displayed, and in quite a few of the towns, there would appear "recommended by xxxxxx" beside the name of the eatery. That made my choice of stop easy. The Garmin maps don't have that sort of detail on them.

I had the ESRI map on my Zumo for the trip around as I had done all my planning on it, and one other member of my group had my Garmin SD card in her Navman and she reported that everywhere we went, the GPS map was spot on. As I said, it is really the same map, just the level of detail that is different.

One thing that may be important to you, the ESRI SD card is locked to your GPS unit. You have to give the serial # of your unit to them when you order it, so cannot be used on any other GPS, whereas the Garmin SD card can be used on any compatible GPS.
 
Deano747;269942 wrote: Have used both and find them both good for sealed roads in the North. Cannot comment for off road stuff.

The Garmin maps are "made" with the information supplied by ESRI with some of the detail removed so they can fit more countries on the SD card. For general riding around, I don't think that you will find any difference.

One area that I used the extra detail of the ESRI maps was in my pre planning. When I was picking lunch stops for the group I brought up last November, I would pick the town or village that I thought I would be in around lunch time and then zoom in to a 50m scale on my Zumo and troll slowly through the town or village. At that scale, most of the bigger eateries are displayed, and in quite a few of the towns, there would appear "recommended by xxxxxx" beside the name of the eatery. That made my choice of stop easy. The Garmin maps don't have that sort of detail on them.

I had the ESRI map on my Zumo for the trip around as I had done all my planning on it, and one other member of my group had my Garmin SD card in her Navman and she reported that everywhere we went, the GPS map was spot on. As I said, it is really the same map, just the level of detail that is different.

One thing that may be important to you, the ESRI SD card is locked to your GPS unit. You have to give the serial # of your unit to them when you order it, so cannot be used on any other GPS, whereas the Garmin SD card can be used on any compatible GPS.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I guess I'll start with the ESRI Map then and see how it goes.
 
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