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" In order to test the strength of our 17 years of blissful marriage, Sweetie and I recently made the six-hour drive from our house in Telluride, Colorado, to Santa Fe to visit the Coen brothers on the set of their new movie. Our big point of contention was the three GPS navigation units I brought along. Sweetie hates them; perhaps she&amp;#039;s jealous of a female voice other than hers telling me what to do.  I brought the new Magellan RoadMate 3000T, Garmin StreetPilot c550, and Pioneer AVIC-S1, each suction-cupped to the windshield, telling me how to get to my destination. (Sweetie, meanwhile, was armed with a paper map.) All of these new navigation devices share the ability to be untethered from the car, so you can use them in more than one vehicle and also as handhelds. Unfortunately, since they&amp;#039;re compact enough to carry, the screens are too small to be very helpful when driving 80 miles per hour on Interstate 15. And, with the exception of the Pioneer, they are still too clunky to hike with.  The (1) Magellan ($599; magellangps.com) has the biggest profile of the bunch, as well as unintuitive controls on the sides of the unit. It does let you download music and pictures using SD memory cards, the thinking being (I guess) that you can take pictures on your road trip and store them to show your in-laws when you finally reach their house. The (2) Garmin ($799; garmin.com) was a bit finicky, often losing its satellite connection and needing to reboot, but it did offer me the safest route home.  The (3) Pioneer ($599; pioneerelectronics.com) was my favorite of the bunch. It was the thinnest--you could take it on a hike if you wanted to be that stupid--and had the most controls on its touch screen. It definitely had the sexiest voice; I think my Pioneer lady smoked a couple packs of cigarettes every night in the garage. The Pioneer and the Garmin can also function as wireless speakerphones if you have a Bluetooth-enabled cell. This is pretty easy to set up and actually useful.  Of course, the reason you buy a nav system is to get you somewhere, and these all had different opinions on the best way to do that. A typical test for us came in Durango, Colorado, when the Magellan and Pioneer voices tried to get me to take a route that would have put us on a scree-laden single-lane mountain pass that I would have been frightened to walk across, much less drive. The voices incessantly demanded that I make a U-turn for more than two miles.  The most important thing I learned on the trip is that every navigation system should have a huge button that says, &amp;quot;Shut up! I am not, when safe, making a legal U-turn. Give it up and find me another route!&amp;quot; Unfortunately, none of the units had such a button, so Sweetie got to point to the map and roll her eyes--almost as often as the devices told me to make a U-turn. The truth is, like being married, there is only one way to deal with a GPS device: Do what it tells you, unwaveringly. If you try to pick and choose directions, you&amp;#039;ll end up on the wrong path of life, being driven crazy with incessant nagging.  Barry Sonnenfeld is the director of The Addams Family, Get Shorty, Men in Black, and RV. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/cars/a287/esq1006digital-88/>