Garmin Nuvi 5000

Design

Boasting a 5.2-inch touchscreen, the Garmin Nuvi 5000 has easily the largest display of any portable nav device on sale in Australia. The 5000's dimensions (143.5mm across, 94.2mm high and 20.3mm thick) are imposing on any windscreen, unless, of course, you're driving a Mack truck, and Garmin has employed no visual tics with the 5000's shape, which can most simply be described as a rectangular block, to help soften the blow.

All too often, in fact, we had to crane our neck to look around the 5000 for fear that it had swallowed up a scooter or a pedestrian. Indeed it got us thinking: how big is big enough? We certainly appreciate the extra detail offered by a widescreen 4.3- or 4.7-inch GPS, and a 5-inch display is definitely nice to have for the elders amongst us, but maybe that extra 0.2-inch is a bit too much of a good thing.

The piano black finish, adorning the screen bezel and the unit's back, looks nice in isolation, but attracts its fair share of fingerprints, while the silver faux-metal piping looks as cheap as it feels. Connected via a special cradle, the windshield mount is straight from lesser Garmin models and, although it looks a tad too small, it has no problem suctioning the Nuvi 5000 to a car windscreen come hell or high speed hump.

The 5000's amazing screen girth is not the only feather in its cap — with a screen resolution of 800x480, it almost triples the number of pixels offered by most widescreen portable nav units. Garmin's easy-to-use interface remains largely untouched on the Nuvi 5000, with the extra servings of pixels and space used primarily for legibility and smoothing out any jaggy edges.

Even for the fattest of fingers, destination entry is a breeze — aided not only by the 5.2-inch screen, but also by the on-screen QWERTY keyboard, a feature that's amazingly not available on all Garmin products. The 5000's map display is easy to read day or night, but Garmin persists with hiding minor streets by default — this can make it hard to marry what's shown on screen with reality, although thankfully this "feature" can be turned off.

Features

Conceived way back in 2007, the Nuvi 5000 does without traffic messaging, junction view and lane guidance, but rather quixotically also does without Bluetooth hands-free. It does, however, come standard with an FM transmitter, MP3 playback, an SD card slot and a light sensor. The GPS cradle features microphone and video inputs, as well as an audio-out jack. The video input allows the Nuvi 5000 to be hooked up to a car's reversing camera, although we're not entirely sure what the mic input's purpose in life is, given the lack of Bluetooth hands-free.

With its FM transmitter and the ability to read music straight off an SD card, the 5000 makes an accomplished server of in-car tunes. Critically, the FM transmitter is strong enough to be almost static free in the suburbs; in the CBD reception suffers a little bit, but static only overwhelms the transmitter on an infrequent basis.

A handy little shortcut button appears on the map screen whenever music is playing, affording users easy access to the track selection menu — it's a shame that this shortcut isn't present all the time, as the music jukebox is buried a bit too deep in the menu structure. Tracks can be selected via name, album, genre, artist or playlist, with album art appearing wherever it's present. Although the unit does remember its position in the last song it played, it doesn't automatically resume playback on start-up.

Performance

This can be a real issue as the Nuvi 5000, surprisingly, doesn't have a built-in battery. Users have to wait about 27.5 seconds for the 5000 to start up, which is, of itself, a frustratingly long wait. It's even more annoying after you've entered a destination, selected your tunes and then start the engine, only for — uh-oh! — the car's power supply to cut out momentarily, causing the Nuvi 5000 to restart itself. As you grizzle for another 27.5 seconds at this poor piece of design and await your chance to select some soothing musical balm, your car's emission of burnt dinosaur remains are slowly roasting our planet for no good reason.

Route calculation times are about class standard, although thankfully things don't deteriorate when the unit's playing music. The routes themselves, naturally, leave quite a bit to be desired, but they'll get you to your destination eventually. As the Garmin comes loaded with Australian maps from Whereis — it also has a set of NZ maps installed too — it doesn't suffer from the same quantity of missing turn restrictions, in inner-Sydney at least, as GPS units loaded with Navteq maps.

Unlike more recent Garmin releases, the 5000 doesn't come preloaded with speed and red light camera warnings — follow our handy guide to find out how. Unfortunately, the 5000 also misses out on junction view for highway and motorway exits, as well as lane guidance.

GPS positioning is fine in the suburbs or the bush; it's just passable in the CBD, with occasional signal drop outs and bouts of confused location positioning. As there's no dead reckoning on-board, you're on your own when you enter a tunnel.

Conclusion

It might be perfect for truck drivers, but the 5.2-inch Garmin 5000 is a bit too big for us car-bound road denizens. And the lack of Bluetooth hands-free, lane guidance and junction view condemns it to also-ran status.