This weekend in Cape Town I had the opportunity in taking a Great Guide for a test drive in Cape Town. For those who do not know what it is: It is a GPS with a built in tour guide. Here is a link to the website: www.greatguide.co.za . The professionalism and responses from their team in setting up the guide with my planned activities was excellent. The GG was ready for me when I arrived in Cape Town. The GG was easily installed and hooked up in the car, the little carry bag contained everything we needed. GG did take some getting used to as I use a Garmin when I am at home however it was quick and responsive and we found what we needed to do and learned how to navigate the devise with ease. Following directions into Cape Town and on to our hotel could have got a tad confusing with various people talking to you at the same time, this however is not the case as the GG uses a few *characters* to guide you on the area through which you are travelling as well as a very definitive voice for giving you directions.
Over the 3 days we had the GG we put it through it’s paces. For finding your way around town and beyond to places not listed in their list of tours or a deviation from your itinerary you will wish you had your Garmin. We decided to take a drive up to Hermanus which was a spur of the moment change. We spent over 15 minutes trying to navigate the device for Hermanus and finally found a police station in Hermanus and used this as a point of reference to get us to our destination. Well this is what we thought anyway. Just outside Cape Town you are presented with a choice to go the high road or the coastal road. Being tourists in our own country we opted for the coastal road. The GG did not like this at all and for the following 10 kilometers it continued to tell us to do a U turn (I guess to take the high road) we eventually got fed up with it and requested us to stop giving directions, we did however leave the guide part on where we learned interesting info on the various attractions we passed on our travels.
On the return to Cape Town we took the high road and had no problem on the return. The hotels we were staying at were pre programmed into the device and selecting one and clicking take me there was child’s play. The unit is no Garmin, (guess I have been spoiled in the past) you can however look past these issues as well as the tiny text of the unit in lure of getting a great informative guide for the city in which you are travelling around.
The drop off is at the arrivals hall and with the chaos that you find Cape Town international airport in you are reminded to drop the device on your way to departures. There are no internal links between the buildings and the commute between check in and arrivals can be a bit of a pain.
GG uses at least 3 characters to narrate the info on the device, the info is informative and well done. The narrators are not over empowering, they sound friendly, the language used is easy to understand so even the tourist with little english vocab will find this device useful. There really is a ton of info on the GG, it is like having the internet searches you want for various activities pre searched and categorized for you.
If you are a tourist or want more info of the city in which you are visiting then the Great Guide is a a winner for you!
Glad you enjoy GreatGuide. GreatGuide is aimed and focused at the tourist market. Our research shows that most of the time tourists want to go to destinations (eg Table Mountain) and not street address (ie Tafelberg Rd), which they often do not know. We thus decided to make GreatGuide destination focused. This is in contrast normal users need or want to go to friends houses, business addresses etc..and thus devices such as the Garmin is street address focused. We also tend to stitch with the makes we know or are use to, and thus Nokia phone users do not like Samsung and vice versa I can only assume that it might be fore these reasons that you would have found going to a Hermanus easier with the Garmin.
All GPS navigator calculate direction on mathematical formulas using either on shortest distance or quickest time and thus would have suffered from the same “do U turn” when you deviated on to scenic route. We are however in the process of developing a new routing algorithm that will also do – Scenic Tourist…. And will keep you posted.
Thanks
GreatGuide team