Best GPS for Cars

Garmin nuvi 350

The sleek, portable nüvi 350 is a GPS navigator, traveler’s reference and digital entertainment system, all in one. It is your pocket-sized personal travel assistant ready for adventure.

Like the rest of the nüvi 300-series, you’re just a few screen taps away from anywhere.

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Full Review

After trying other Garmin units, this is the one I kept. Simply wonderful. I bought it when it was more than triple its current price and thought it was good deal then. It’s a great deal now. 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

As well as 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. I have to say that it left me very impressed!

Product Information

nüvi 350 comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded City Navigator® NT street maps, including a hefty points of interest (POIs) database with hotels, restaurants, fuel, ATMs and more. Simply touch the color screen to enter a destination, and nüvi takes you there with 2-D or 3-D maps and turn-by-turn voice directions. It even announces the name of exits and streets so you never have to take your eyes off the road. In addition, nüvi 350 accepts custom points of interest (POIs), such as school zones and safety cameras and lets you set proximity alerts to warn you of upcoming POIs. The European version even includes a preloaded safety camera database containing the location of safety cameras for parts of Europe.

Product Features

• Voice prompts (e.g. “Turn right in 500 ft.”)
• Speaks street names (e.g. “Turn right ON ELM STREET in 500 ft.”)
• Auto re-route (fast off-route and detour recalculation)
• Choice of route setup (faster time, shorter distance, off road)
• Route avoidance (avoid highways, tolls etc.)
• FM traffic compatible
• Custom POIs (ability to add additional points of interest)
• Garmin Garage™ vehicles compatible (download car-shaped icons to your device)
• World travel clock, currency & unit converter, calculator
• Picture viewer
• MP3 player
• Audio book player
• Headphone jack/audio line-out
• Garmin Lock™ (anti-theft feature)
• Touchscreen
• Not Motorcycle-friendly
• This USB mass storage device is compatible with Windows® 2000 or later and Mac® OS X 10.4 or later.
• Battery life up to 8 hours
• Preloaded street maps
• Ability to add maps
• Built-in memory (internal solid state)
• Accepts data cards: SD™ card (not included)
• Waypoints/favorites/locations:     500

Technical Details

• Unit dimensions, WxHxD:   3.87″W x 2.91″H x .87″D (9.83 x 7.39 x 2.21 cm)
• Display size, WxH:     2.8″W x 2.1″H (7.2 x 5.4 cm); 3.5″ diag (8.9 cm)
• Display resolution, is 320 x 240 pixels
• Display type QVGA color antiglare TFT with white backlight
• Weight: 5.1 ounces (144.6 g)
• Battery is rechargeable lithium-ion