We used both. The nice thing about an in car gps is that you don’t use expensive international data. Probably not an issue for Eric who likely has a euro based plan.
I have an older model Nuvi that works well. The lifetime maps update is a great feature that mine doesn’t have; each update costs $89. Does the 2559 have speed limit and camera warnings (a great feature)?
If you have an unlocked and/or France sim data plan or are an American T-Mobile customer (free international data), an iPhone works very well, especially using the Waze navigation app.
Yes. Apple Maps and Google Maps (and Waze, which is a Google owned crowd sourced overlay app of Google Maps), do turn by turn voice. As do other navigation apps.
Thanks! Only recently got a 6, and started using the Apple map voice directions, which (so far) has been amazingly good. I don’t know how the dedicated nav companies are going to stay in business, my old Garmin is history now.
We recently switched to T-mobile and took our phones to England a few months ago. Free data, as mentioned, and GPS worked well. Only disadvantage vs in-car GPS is the smaller screen.
More FYI from my Spain trip. Google maps does not support offline maps for the country.
Big news is turn-by-turn DOES work when you’re not connected which was a life saver in Spain.
Just start the navigation with maps in the hotel while connected to the internet. Bam!!! then off we go with turn by turn and no data connection. Did it all over Spain. Note: will not recalculate your route but I used it this way for hours at a time.