Nextar 3.5-Inch Touch Screen GPS Vehicle Navigator With MP3 Player
Nextar 3.5-Inch Touch Screen GPS Vehicle Navigator With MP3 Player
The Nextar X3-03 GPS assures that your days of getting lost are over! Finding an address or any one of 150,000 points of interest such as the nearest gas station or restaurant is a snap anywhere in the U.S.A. and Canada. Just enter information on the X3-03’s 3.5 inch touch screen and let the voice prompt and detailed map guide you to the destination. The X3-03’s built in MP3 player will entertain you with your favorite tunes en route. Just insert your favorite play list SD card into the slot. The X3-03 moves easily from car to car using the convenient vent mount. A rechargeable lithium ion battery assures that the unit stays active. The Nextar X3-03 will provide you with worry free navigation on even the most complex routes.
User Ratings and Reviews
2 Stars Don’t buy! Last less than 2 years. No support after 1 year of warranty.
I love this product when it works. it has all the functionalities I need for a GPS, some of the features match or even better than a popular Garmin. And that is why it make me so mad and upset when it suddenly stop working. Now I have to spend time to find another matchable GPS in a different name brand, because I know for sure I won’t buy another Nextar no matter how good they are when they works. I can’t afford to lose the direction in the middle of trip, and I don’t want to spend money or time to do a research and learn to use a new GPS every two years.
I bought a NEXTAR GPS #C3 back in June 2007. Without much use, in December 2007 it stop working and freeze at the very first loading screen. Since it is still within 1-year warranty period, I called in in April 2008, pay the $11 shipping and return my unit to the Nextar headquarter for a repair, and because they had discontinued the C3 at that time, they gave me a X3-03 as replacement in May 2008. in December 2009 it stop working again, with the same problem freeze at the loading page as the last model. even though I was told to press the ‘reset’ button should solve the problem but it didn’t. and since this time it is already pass wararnty period, they don’t even take it back for repairing. while asking for instruction to fix by myself, the ‘technical’ support have no solution at all, only thing they know is gave you instruction to return to warehouse if within warranty OR nothing if out of warranty. basically there are NO support at all.
so my suggestion for any NEXTAR GPS is: buy it at your luck, knowing that it won’t last long, prepare to pay shipping to return for repair, prepare to throw it away after 1-year warranty ended if anything goes wrong. enjoy it when you can. and if you are going for a long trip better have a second GPS or map on hand, you never know when it is going to stop working and there won’t be any solution to fix it easily.
1 Stars waste of my money
didnt even last 6 months. they did replace it but same problems with the replacement so now i have a lot of money wasted on this purchase and a gps that dos not work. dont buy nextar
1 Stars This GPS ruined Thanksgiving and made my girlfriend cry.
This review is going to take the form of a story. Bear with me.
My girlfriend’s family celebrates Thanksgiving every year at the ancestral family home, an otherwise-abandoned house in the wilds of Colleton County, South Carolina. When I first went there, last year, I’d been told there was no street address at all — apparently, the mailman just knew where to take everyone’s mail. So last year, planning ahead, I’d saved the location into my older GPS (the cheapest TomTom available at the time I bought it).
This year, though, a friend was coming along, and he didn’t know how to get there. So I gave him the old GPS and we decided to rely on my girlfriend’s memory of the drive. For backup, we brought along this Nextar GPS, which she’d been given for Christmas the year before and had never used.
Unfortunately, due to some faulty directions from a family member, we missed our exit, only realizing that we were off-course almost an hour later when the friend who’d followed my other GPS called me up because he’d been there for fifteen minutes and was wondering where we were.
So at that point, we fell back on our backup plan: the Nextar x3-03. I was driving, so my girlfriend took the GPS and started trying to program it. Remember, we didn’t have a direct street address, so the initial plan was just to get us close enough that my girlfriend’s memories could take over. First thing we tried was plugging in a nearby small town, Canadys.
According to this GPS, Canadys doesn’t exist. Maybe I shouldn’t blame the GPS for that, since Canadys’ only post office closed down in 1992, and apparently it’s legally classified as a “community or populated place,” not a “town” according to the census, but still, there are road signs to it and everything. It just doesn’t exist in the world of Nextar.
So we tried filling in the next-nearest town, Smoaks. It did have Smoaks. Ok. So we plug in Smoaks and drive for an hour and we’re getting close, we’re running only about a half-hour past time for the blessing, we’re thinking maybe this is recoverable, but we’re still a fair distance away.
About then her family starts calling with suggestions. Most of them are pretty useless, since we don’t know where we are to begin with, but her sister manages to track down the actual, historical street address of the house, off of Highway 61, and texts it to us. So my girlfriend plugs it in. Or rather, she tries to. It takes her twenty minutes, because the touchscreen is incredibly sensitive, and every time she hits the backspace, it enters a G, or a B, or some other random letter. When she finally gets “highway 61″ plugged in, it only has street numbers up to ~2000, and the street address we have for the house is about five thousand more than that. SO that’s a nix.
We know the house is near the intersection of Highway 61 and Interstate 95. We figure those are both pretty basic landmarks. My girlfriend spends the next half hour trying to plug that in. I experience that time mostly as a series of choked screams from the passenger’s seat, things like “—MMIT I HIT S” or “WHERE THE —- IS THE INTERSTATE.” Turns out that the intersection of I-95 and Highway 61 doesn’t exist in Nextar World. This is pretty surprising, since the interstate highway system is something you’d think a modern GPS would be able to find, but apparently that was an unreasonable expectation on my part.
Her sister eventually found someone else in the family who was there and a had a GPS, a good GPS that understood the concept of location, and pulled the exact latitude and longitude of the house off that one, then text-messaged it to us. Problem: the Nextar x3-03 doesn’t appear to have any way to enter a pair of latitude/longitude coordinates. The first GPS I ever owned, a 1998 Magellan that didn’t even have any roadmaps in it, just an *arrow* that swiveled to point at your destination, could comprehend latitude and longitude. That was the only thing it *did* understand. If it hadn’t been one of the five electronic devices in the world that got burned out by the Y2K bug, it would have been a better guide in our situation than this Nextar, and gotten us there sooner.
Eventually, my girlfriend breaks down crying because she realizes that she’s going to miss dinner with her family at Thanksgiving, so I pull over, take the GPS, and try just plugging in Highway 61 intersecting with Highway 61, in the hope that it’ll at least get us to the road that way. We do that. We drive for a half hour and when we finally hit Highway 61, we realize it’s taken us halfway back down to Charleston, directly away from where we needed to be.
We finally get there, over two hours late, only to find that my friend had been sitting in his car by the side of the road the whole time because he didn’t want to introduce himself & be a complete stranger. So we all three missed Thanksgiving dinner. We made up for it by spending the next few hours shooting off her father’s black-powder cannon, and we did all get a hearty serving of the leftovers, but still. When we eventually made it back to civilization, my girlfriend set her facebook status to “My GPS is useless. It can neither be eaten nor burned for warmth.”
Some of the fault for this whole fiasco rests on us, of course — we could’ve gotten better directions before we left, etc. It may be that the Nextar x3-03 has all the features above, and if we’d, say, figured out a hidden menu option that allowed the entry of latitude/longitude coordinates, it would’ve have gotten us there on time.
But if those features exist, we couldn’t find them, and that’s a problem. You don’t need a GPS when you’re perfectly prepared and have directions and are heading somewhere that’s easy to find — you need a GPS when you’re lost, late, and trying to find somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And when we were lost and late for Thanksgiving dinner, this thing couldn’t even find the intersection of a major state highway and Interstate 95.
It ruined Thanksgiving, and made my girlfriend cry.
2 Stars When it worked it was GREAT!!
I received this GPS for Mother’s Day in May. LOVED it!! The sound was good and the picture and turn by turn was GREAT. Then in June I was transporting the school basketball team (4 hours away) and tried to enter where we were going. The GPS wouldn’t work. I had to go and hoped that it would start working as we drove along. Luckly it did start working. Then in July the night before we left on vacation the GPS did the same thing as it did in June. I hoped while driving it would start working like it did before but sad to say it didn’t. When we returned home I pulled the info out of the box to call to see about getting a new one. I was told that I shouldn’t have let the battery run down and now I needed to recharge the battery for 9 hours then see if the item would work. It didn’t. I called and was then told that I would be charged $25.00 to have a new one sent to me after I paid to have the unit that I had returned to them. I reminded them that I have the receipt for May and had it less then 90 days before having problems. The representive then told me they would waive the $25.00 fee but I would have to pay to return it. I have yet to receive a new unit. I received a email stating that they received my unit and when I call about it they state it will be shipped shortly. It is now October.
1 Stars If you want it to last more than 1 year…..it won’t!
It is a good GPS that we bought based on the good reviews for the price. It was a Christmas gift last year and by this Christmas the unit completely stopped working. Because we bought it at a Black Friday sale the unit was a month old before we gave it for Christmas. So now Nextar will not help us at all because their warranty is only 12 months. They would not even give us any ideas to try to trouble shoot the unit. I will never buy one of their products again! Terrible customer service and terrible product quality!
Filed under: Portable GPS Ratings