Garmin GPS Nuvi Series

Pretty cool… but a little spooky, June 24, 2006

I’m not Stefanie, but her husband Ed,

Okay, I like techy things, but the Garmin Nuvi 350 is really neat. I am currently on a trip across the US. I have now traveled over 1700 miles and the thing has yet to give me bad directions. I have traveled in town, freeways, rural roads with no signs, and into the mountains. I have lost signal twice, both times happened when I went into mountain tunnels, more on this in a minute.

Setup:
Out of the box it took about 2 minutes before I was up and running. The window attachement is quite good and I don’t think it’s coming off my window without help. The interanl battery is good for about 5 hours…the DC adapter has a long cord so you can use it in a secondary DC plug-in.
Small in size it doesn’t obstruct the view.
The screen is quite bright.
The speaker and volume are quite good.

Use:

Type in address and go. Pretty simple. It held the tracking signal even in mountain canyons, as I was driving I started thinking about how hard that had to be. Anyway, the maps were great as they let me see the turns up ahead before I got there. The voice prompts were absolutely on target. At one point, Nuvi told me to take a named road, but there were no signs. So I ignored the voice prompt. Nuvi recalculated the route in about 5 seconds and got me back on track. Oh, by-the-way, I should have listened as Nuvi was correct.

Nuvi can also provide a list hotels, food places, and gas stations in your vicinity with phone numbers. This was quite handy.

The only thing that I would recommend to Garmin is that when you cross time zones that it should update the time of arrival in the time of the new zone.

This has a been a very good purchase. Oh, and my wife likes it too.

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