What are the advantages of the Garmin?
It works in an aircraft
The GPS in my Ipad2/3G is junk. It cannot be relied on even as a backup for a backup.
Would love any thoughts and pros/cons of running the 695 with iPad as a backup
The Ipad is an excellent document reader. It is great for displaying approach plates, even enroute charts (if you can find an easy way to generate them and get them into it - e.g. from Flitestar, printed to PDFs), and would be fine for airport data publications like Pooleys.
Just don't rely on it for something you absolutely need in the cockpit, because unlike paper it can pack up. You can't get a
Genius Bar appointment at FL100
But it is not a backup for a GPS. Not unless you run it with one of the very few i-device-compatible bluetooth GPSs, and then you have yet another battery powered gadget to manage.
Incidentally, Memory Map have just updated their IOS app. Guess what they have done? They have removed the wifi map download feature, so the only way to get maps into the Ipad is with Itunes
I'd like to know what these people are smoking.