Garmin Nuvi 350 Pocket or Vehicle GPS Navigator with Integrated MP3 Player and Photo Viewer What if one device could help you navigate anywhere in the U.S. and Canada, while offering travel tips, storing your favorite tunes and photos, providing translation assistance, and more? That device is here, and it’s not much bigger than a deck of cards. The Garmin n vi 350 is set to revolutionize what we expect from a GPS navigation device, or from any device for that matter.

A simple touchscreen interface and voice guidance allow you to keep your eyes on the road. View larger.

Listen to an audio book or an MP3 while you’re on the road. View larger.

The slim design integrates a USB port, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot. View larger.

Design
With a total weight of 5.1 ounces and slim measurements of 3.87 x 2.91 x 0.87 inches (WxHxD), the n vi 350 is just right for the pocket or purse. A bright, 64,000-color display dominates the front of the device and a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels means that there’s plenty of room for displaying map data and other elements of the device’s interface. An SD memory card slot is provided for expansion software, such as a points of interest database, media files and electronic guides (see below). The flip-up antenna includes an MCX-type connector for connecting the unit to an external GPS antenna. Meanwhile, a powerful built-in speaker resides on the back of device. A built-in lithium ion battery will give you for to eight hours of battery life, depending on use. In addition to an AC charger, the unit also ships with a 12-volt power adapter for vehicle charging, as well as a windshield suction cup mount.

Detailed 3D map views, combined with voice turn-by-turn guidance, make navigation a breeze.

Fortunately, Garmin has made it easy to interface with the n vi 350’s 700 megabytes of onboard memory, thanks to “plug-and-play” USB mass storage support. Just plug the device into your computer’s USB port and you’ve got instantaneous access to all the audio books, music, photos, supplemental maps and other data on the n vi 350’s internal and SD card memory.

Navigation
The n vi 350 is first and foremost a personal GPS device. Wherever you go — in your car or on foot– the device offers extremely accurate position data, thanks to a high-sensitivity integrated GPS receiver by SiRF and WAAS-enabled, 12-satellite reception. Combined with detailed maps of the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico the n vi 350 provides automatic routing, turn-by-turn voice directions, and touchscreen control– making it easy to find your way anywhere. Plus, the unique “text-to-speech” feature calls out turns by street name, and you can choose from either 2D or 3D mapping perspectives when you’re viewing your route on the display. Additionally, the n vi 350 is compatible with Garmin’s GTM 10 FM TMC traffic receiver*, which allows users to avoid traffic tie-ups by simply pushing a button that will calculate a new route.

As mentioned, the n vi 350 comes packed with mapping data for North America, but you can can also load up your custom points of interest. Set up proximity alerts for school zones, safety cameras, and more using Garmin’s free POI (points of interest) loader program (available from garmin.com).

Tools for the Journey
Navigation is just part of the journey, and the n vi 350 is one of the first devices to recognize that. The built-in “Travel Kit” offers an MP3 player, an audio book player from Audible.com, a jpeg-format picture viewer, a world travel clock with time zones, a currency converter, a measurement converter, and a calculator.

In addition to the included travel tools, additional software add-ons are available, such as the Garmin Language Guide, with data provided by Oxford University Press. This software suite contains a multilingual word bank, phrase bank, and five bilingual dictionaries. The multilingual word bank and phrase bank supports nine languages and dialects, including American English, British English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, European Spanish, and Latin American Spanish. Now you can look up and translate more than 17,000 words or 20,000 phrases per language — right in the palm of your hand. Through the unit’s text-to-speech interface, users can get a spoken pronunciation of each entry in the word bank, along with gender and part of speech information.

Another useful add-on software package, the Garmin Travel Guide, is loaded with information provided by Marco Polo. These guides put in-depth travel information such as reviews and recommendations for restaurants, tourist attractions, and more at your fingertips. The software allows you to navigate to an address or search points of interest– places like hotels, restaurants, shopping, and tourist attractions. The n vi 350 automatically calculates the fastest route and provides voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions along the way. The unit also audibly announces the name of upcoming streets– letting you keep your eyes on the road while navigating through busy traffic and tricky roadways. And if you stray off course, the n vi 350 automatically calculates the quickest way to get back on track.

*Traffic services available only in select cities where RDS-TMC coverage exists. Requires the GTM 10 FM TMC traffic receiver and subscription fee to enable traffic capability.

What’s in the Box
n vi 350, travel kit, vehicle suction cup mount, carrying case, 12-24 volt adapter cable, dashboard disk, USB interface cable, sample language guide content, sample MP3s, and quick reference guide.
Customer Review: nice and useful but not mac compatible
I just got one of these units and I’m pretty pleased with it. My only complaint is that you need a PC to use the computer based functions (uploads, updates, etc) and that’s pretty annoying. Luckily I can use a PC at work but it’s such a failure of the last mile to not to make this thing compatible across both platforms.

For this reason, I gave it 3 stars. Happy with it over all, for the money I expect way more though.

Also, it offers “travel features” but not all of them come for free so it’s a bit misleading.
Customer Review: Very nice, maps aren’t so great
The nuvi is shirt-pocket portable. It’s fast to acquire satellites and accurate. The text-to-speech is pretty good, so that you don’t need to look at its screen while driving and the street names give added confidence. I was concerned it wouldn’t call out names soon enough but it gives several warnings.

The maps are out of date. They don’t contain Naperville’s 95th street library, nor the street it is on, though both have been around for years. For locations it can calculate, it sometimes gets the side of the street incorrect. No big deal.

The nuvi doesn’t include any maintenance on the maps. If you ever want your map to contain the 95th street library, you will have to fork out the $75 to upgrade the maps. Obsolete maps on a >$600 product seems kind of cheap to me.

Overall, a nice product.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 12:24 am and is filed under Redneck Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.