We're heading to France in a month for a wedding, maybe two hours' drive outside of Paris. It would be helpful to have some kind of nav system, that I buy before we go, which speaks English and has European maps. Obviously, I'm looking for something of the "portable / car" variety, and some sort of real-time traffic would certainly be helpful.

Thoughts on this? Tom Tom vs. Garmin vs. whatever else? I suppose another alternative is to pony up for a data roaming plan for my iPhone and use that -- probably cheaper than buying a dedicated nav system, but will I get good data service between cities in agricultural regions of France?

I just got one of these Garmin Nuvi 270 for $140 from Amazon.
Preloaded with all of North America and Europe.
It's EOL for a low-end model. Simple to use.

So what's the difference between the low-end Garmin models and the high-end ones? Seems like Garmin has some 27 different car-based models to choose from.

I haven't studied the high-end models, but basically I think the abilities grow with additions of
*pronounce street names
*acts as bluetooth phone extension
*route based on traffic data
*mp3 player

They also vary the price within a model range based on the maps that are loaded.
In the 'old' 200 series, the 200 was the cheapest, with only USA maps loaded, then the 250 with all of NA, then the 270 with NA and Europe. All of these were the same hardware and software.
The 200 has been superseded by the 205, so I imagine you'll have the map-database extensions being 255 and 275.

Like I said, I haven't studied the upper level stuff or the new stuff- the basic unit is good enough for me. Plenty of info out there, though.

The upper upper end ones do voice commands, too.

Oh yes! I'd forgotten about that. Pretty clever.

The voice recognition worked really well, it totally surprised me that it would be that good in a moving car.

Can the lower models play music on an SD or MicroSD card? Also can they transmit the music / directions over FM?
Other features the higher end models might have:

*Lane assist
*Car, Bike, Walking directions
*CityXplorer maps (public transit routing)
*Larger Screens (this is NICE)

Garmin prices from Amazon:

nuvi 270 (discontinued): $140
nuvi 275t: $240
nuvi 775t: $321 $455 (the cheaper price was on the non-Europe version)
nuvi 1370t: $450 (brand new, available any day now)

The 275t adds real-time traffic and Bluetooth. The 775t is widescreen and adds the lane assistance as well as A2DP support. The super-cheap price on the 270 is appealing, but then the real-time traffic and whatnot on the 275t sounds appealing.

Hmm....

So I decided to go with the 275t. Digging through the reviews, it seems like they've improved several things relative to the 270, and it's hard to justify spending the extra money on the fancier versions when, for the most part, I'm normally pretty good at finding my way around without any gadgets at all.

Looking forward to hearing how you like it.

We've been playing around with voice recognition in noisier environments (helicopter cockpits) for years. It still surprises people that it works at all, much less how well it works.