Garmin nüvi 350 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
Garmin nüvi 350 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
It has all the characteristics that I was looking for:
1) VERY compact — easily able to fit in a breast pocket
2) Text-to-Speech — announces proper street names, not just "turn left in 500 feet"; radically reduces how much you need to look at the screen to figure out the real instructions; wouldn’t own a GPS unit wihtout this
3) Bright Screen — readable in virtually every situation
AND
Faster location of the GPS satellites. This turns out to be quite important in day-to-day use. In the other systems, it wasn’t unusual that we could be driving for a couple minutes before it located the satellites and could give us directions. With this unit, the satellites are located almost as quickly as the unit fully starts up.
One comment on how we use this: We don’t mount it on the dash board or on the window (which is technically illegal here in California). Instead we just lay this on the center console in our van or car. The antenna system is plenty sensitive to work just like this and we’ve never lost the satellite signals except in tunnels.
We also like all the potential of the traveling features (clock, calculator, etc.), but this is the one to own even if you just use it for the basic GPS features.
Very impressed.
How Its Ease-of-Use Enhanced Our Vacation: We were recently on a vacation combined with a business conference. While I was at the conference, my family had the confidence to explore the city without ever getting lost. Even our kids were able to help enter addreses and find locations.
Factoring In Added Cost: Just a warning about upgrade costs. Although Garmin does a good job of releasing updates to their system software that either fixes bugs or adds enhancements, the cost to update the built-in maps is extra. And they issue updates about once a year.
