Stopped at my local Target today and they had the Garmin 260W GPS on clearance for 188.xx and the Garmin 200 on clearance for 101.xx. They had maybe 4 or 5 of the 260W's left and about 10 of the 200's. This was at the
west-end Billings, MT Target.

As usual, very YMMV.

Good luck!

can anybody comment on the relative merits of spending the extra $ on the 260W compared to the 200? also note that Amazon has the 360 for $189 as its gold box deal today.

halo0 said:The larger screen is much nicer. Also the 200 has no text to speech. You really want text to speech in a GPS.

+1

summer2005 said:ok, i may be asking a silly Q but could somebody please explain what text to speach is in relation to a GPS. what does one with it do that one without does not?
Here is the benefits of TextToSpeech.

With Text-To-Speech --- GPS Says: "In 500 feet, Turn Right on Beach St."
With-OUT Text-To-Speech --- GPS Says: "In 500 feet, Turn Right."

Hope it helps.

summer2005 said:ok, i may be asking a silly Q but could somebody please explain what text to speach is in relation to a GPS.

Unit without text-to-speech (TTS): "Turn left 300 feet."
Unit with text-to-speech (TTS): "Turn left onto Adams Road in 300 feet."

In other words, TTS means the unit speaks the name of the road onto which an upcoming turn is to be made. This can be extremely handy in areas where there there may be multiple roads branching off and/or intersecting with each other within a short distance, since it lets you know onto which one of the 5 streets, roads, alleys, etc., you must turn, without requiring you to take your eyes off the road for a look at the GPS unit's screen.

TTS is not always perfect, in that it sometimes mispronounces a street name. Then again, so do I occasionally mispronounce a proper name. Almost always, however, TTS will pronounce a street name in a recognizable manner. For example, not far from me is "Shawan Road." It's pronounced like "Juan," but with the "sh" sound at the start of the word. One syllable.

Garmin units tend to pronounce it as "Shay Win" Road. This is wrong, but if you know there's a right turn coming up in 300 feet, and the unit tells you it's onto Shay Win Rd., and the sign says Shawan Rd., you'd have to be rather dim not to suspect that just maybe that's the road the unit's talking about.

Most of the time, the pronunciation of street names is accurate. I'd say 10% of the time, it's off a little. This figure is probably influenced to a considerable degree by the prevalence of exotic and/or foreign names in your area. Not that a street name has to be exotic or foreign to give the unit problems, but in general "Main Street" will be pronounced correctly just about 100% of the time. Whereas "Xichotkhma Street" might be mispronounced.

thank you, that is a very useful feature especially in busy or unknown areas. i have the nuvi 200 but might have to trade it in the the next one up with text to speach.

went to 2 targets in 2 cities. Didn't see any clearance GPS.

I bought a $7.49 clearance Kodak cameria bag for the Garmin 4.3 in GPS. It holds the GPS AND the windshield mount AND car charger. Much better than cases that hold only the GPS.
This makes it easy to take the GPS when traveling.

Anyone else ever able to confirm this deal?

manoverboard said:All this talk about GPS's. Just go to My free GPS Offer, sign up for the discover card, activate it .....and they will send you one. No need to pay for one of these. We've all gotten them. Actually got an extra for back up under a second account.

That's where I got mine, however, not everyone is going to qualify for a Discover card.

Newegg has the 250W for $189, so you're essentially getting the TTS for "free". Not bad. Thanks for posting, I'm looking for one for my Dad for Christmas and this may work!