Design
In terms of looks the Garmin Nuvi 265WT graduated magna cum laude from the If It Ain't Broke Design School because, well, it looks like any other widescreen Garmin from the past year or two. This means it has a body that's basically a rounded rectangle with a greyish black finish — nice but by no means earth shattering.
As with other recent Garmin car GPS devices, it features a windshield mount which features a ball joint, allowing the screen to be easily manoeuvred for optimum viewing. It's also compact and easy to disassemble for minimum impact on the glovebox, while the levered suction cup sticks manfully to the windscreen, withstanding car vibrations and road imperfections alike.
The interface, which is entirely driven via the 4.3-inch touchscreen, is an exemplar of ease of use. On start-up you're greeted with a simple main menu featuring two large icons, Where To? and View Map, with some smaller buttons for Tools, Volume and Phone underneath. Destination entry is simple because, unlike some cheaper Garmin models, the powers that be have given us a QWERTY on-screen keyboard.
Map screen graphics are smooth, rounded and pleasant on the eye, with easy access to the main menu, as well as a turn-by-turn route summary (via a click on the next turn instruction) and trip statistics (via the current speed panel). The only minor blot on the 265WT's copy book is the level of map detail. Like other Garmins, it's set to "normal" by default meaning that minor roads are sometimes removed from view. It sounds good in theory but, like communism and drinking beer at 9am, in practice it's a bit of a duffer because, as you're driving along, streets disappear and reappear with a casual randomness that's quite annoying.
Features
In addition to the widescreen and traffic capabilities hinted at by this 265WT's array of suffixes, this Garmin features traffic messaging, Bluetooth hands-free, spoken street names and speed camera warnings. With a list price of AU$549, items like an FM transmitter, MP3 playback, lane guidance and junction view have been left off the spec sheet.
Bluetooth pairing wasn't too much of a hassle with our Palm Centro but we were unable to unable to hear or be heard. When we used a Sony Ericsson, however, everything went swimmingly, with the phone calls coming through the Nuvi's speaker loud and clear enough for short conversations. So if you're truly keen on a Nuvi 265WT, it might be worth your while to try pairing your phone with it in the store prior to purchase.
As with other devices using Whereis maps, the 265WT's text-to-speech (or spoken street names) feature works, but struggles a lot of with the pronunciation of many of our road names. Words of Aboriginal origin, such as Illawarra, come out as a dog's breakfast of letters, while others are mispronounced with comical effect — the old Bourke as Bork chestnut springs quickly to mind.
In terms of safety camera warnings, the 265WT is one step forward and two steps back. The step forward is that the company has preloaded the 265WT with such alerts — older models, such as the 260W and 760 required the user to download and install files from the company's Australian website. One of the steps back is that the preloaded alerts are only for speed cameras, not red-light cameras nor school zones. The other step back is that the new alerts consist of an aircraft-like charm noise, accompanied by a warning icon with impossibly tiny text for the speed limit. Thankfully the old style alerts, which read aloud the speed limit or warning type, can still be downloaded and installed from the company's site and work fine on the 265WT — instructions for downloading and installing these alerts can be found in our handy guide.
Performance
As there's no sleep mode, the 265WT takes about 15-20 seconds to boot up every time you set off on the road. As we've experienced with other Garmin devices, this Nuvi's route calculation algorithms seem to prefer more roundabout routes than is usually the norm amongst sat navs. While there's an occasional error with turn restrictions, the odd phantom street and less than perfect mapping in rural areas, if you apply a little common sense the Garmin will get you from A to B and back again — just don't expect the quickest and most efficient route.
Once the Garmin has calculated a route for you, there's, unfortunately, no way to get it to avoid certain roads — the best you can do is ask for a detour, or just ignore it for a while and let it recalculate a route more to your liking. In the heart of the CBD the 265WT performed no worse and no better than average, with the odd satellite drop out and a smattering of confused positioning. Also dropping out on a few occasions was the Nuvi's speaker — once as we neared our destination and another time as we were backing out of the driveway — which, after a quick expletive or two, was remedied by switching the 265WT off and then back on.
Traffic
The Garmin 265WT's traffic antenna is built into the unit's cigarette lighter charger. However, unlike the Navman S300t, it's not completely incognito as the cable linking the Garmin to your car is double the thickness of normal cables, plus there's a solid black rectangular blob about seven-eighths of the way up said cable. Still, it's miles better than the separate traffic antennas seen on TomTom and Mio devices, which can either dangle, cluttering up your dashboard, or be suction cupped to your windscreen base.
With the antenna-cum-power cable plugged in, a traffic button appears in the top left corner of the map screen. Normally a green colour, the button turns red if there are any traffic incidents on route with an estimate of the delay appearing alongside. The button also allows for easy access to traffic messaging related functions, such as Traffic Search, which lists all traffic events, and Traffic on Route that shows a map overview of traffic incidents that you'll be driving through. There's also Show Traffic Map that mutes the colours on the main map screen, giving greater prominence to traffic events. Oddly, the only ways to view a zoomed out map overview of all the traffic events in the city is to click through from Traffic Search list or to have incidents on the current route, and the direction of the incident (such as northbound or westbound) is omitted.
Conclusion
With its relatively elegant traffic antenna and simple-to-use interface, the Garmin Nuvi 265WT makes a good case for itself. Our only real disappointment was with its speed light camera alerts, which are a step backward. Thankfully though this can be worked around. If, in your books, AU$549 is a bit too much for a traffic-enabled GPS there's always the narrow screened Nuvi 265T for AU$100 less.
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