I agree with Ludwig - the 196 is a great little device.
I've had mine for just over two months now and it has guided me on various journeys from London to places including Mulhouse, La Rochelle, Jersey, Scotland and numerous local trips without missing a beat.
The information on airfields is quite useful - on one occasion I was gettting no reply from Cherbourg on the frequency listed in the 2002 Pooleys, so looked it up in the Garmin and found a different one listed which did the trick.
The on-screen text is quite small, so you'll need to mount it somewhere close to you. It does come with a range of mounts included in the box, which makes a nice change from some others where you have to pay extra. Likewise for the computer interface cable.
Several software revisions have already been released which you can download and apply. I think that 2.04 is the latest.
The airspace maps are OK, and you can declutter the screen to throw boundaries into sharper relief. It does not seem to display ATZ boundaries within a MATZ, or MATZ stubs which is a bit of a drawback sometimes. It would be nice to have a colour version, but the greyscale display it pretty good, and has adjustable backlighting.
The extended runway centreline chevrons are something which I find useful when approaching my destination.
The process for entering your own waypoints from the map display is not as intuitive as the Skymap, and it lacks the handy little textual location display (e.g. "2.5 miles NW of Southampton") but you can buy that sort of thing separately.
I get about the same battery life as Ludwig.
I have used it in the car, but only to play around with rather than to really get me somewhere. It seemed to work pretty well, and comes up with proper driving instructions with road numbers. You can add Metro Guide cards to it so that it has detailed navigation instructions, but I haven't bothered with that.
It has quite a handy flight log feature, and you can download a little log book program from the Garmin web site which will pull data from the GPS into the log on your computer.
There's also an 'E6B' computer function which works out TAS and winds aloft for you if you enter OAT and IAS etc.
Overall I'm very happy with it. The main thing I'd really like is colour, but no doubt that would take the price over the £1,000 mark.