Garmin Nuvi 300 & 350
Reviewed by Duncan Houston, 2005
reviewer@globalpositioningsystems.co.uk
What’s in the box?
GARMIN NüVI 300 / 350(UK & IRELAND)
Quick reference guide: All you need to know to get you started
PC Connection: USB interface cable
Power supply: 12-24 volt cigarette lighter cable
Case: Carry case
Mount: Suction cup mount and Dashboard disk
Nuvi 350 carries full European mapping while the 300 is UK only. Aside from this, and the text-to-speech facility on the 350, both units are very similar. Text-to-speech allows full road names to be announced so, rather than the usual, "Turn left", you will hear, "Turn left on to the B1365". The downside is that the voice is rather 'robotic' and can be difficult to understand to some people.
The Nuvi Unit
nuvi 300
It’s a strange thing Garmin’s product release policy; nothing new is released for ages, and then, all of a sudden a raft of new devices appear that make you wonder just who they are employing these days: Gone are the massive, ‘American’, style units that Garmin are renowned for, and in their place come a new breed of diminutive, and quite frankly astonishing products that are imbued with that all important, ‘must have’, factor; devices so cute and user friendly that one can only assume Garmin have sacked their old design staff (they certainly must have got rid of the interface design staff at any rate) and started over completely.
The Nuvi is just one of Garmin’s new breed, let’s take a look...
Big things come in little packages
Packed into its diminutive dimensions (3.87" W x 2.91" H x 0.87" D, 5.1 ounces) is a portable GPS navigator, Audio Book Player, traveller's reference, and MP3 player. Yes, it can do many other things besides navigate you from A to B, and it runs CitySelect V8, supporting full 7 digit postcodes for the UK (at last).
A quick tour of main features
Sporting a 320 x 240 pixels (3.5" diagonal) 64k TFT touch screen display, the Nüvi's built in SiRF III GPS provides automatic routing, turn-by-turn voice directions, and touch screen control, but that’s just for starters…
For the easily bored and the permanently unimpressed, the Nüvi also packs an MP3 player, audio book player (from Audible.com), JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, and a calculator.
MP3 Player
nuvi mp3 player
Copying music to the SD card is simple: Connect the Nuvi to a PC and ‘drag and drop’ the files of your choice to the internal memory or to an SD card. Yes the Nüvi also support external memory cards to enhance its already ample 400MB internal memory, so you can fill a 1GB SD card with music, connect the Nüvi to your car stereo (via an optional adapter), and enjoy mp3 music with directional prompts overlaid as and when necessary! That’s right; you didn’t misread the last sentence: The Nüvi can play mp3s and navigate at the same time, stopping the music briefly to announce the next instruction, then carrying on as before. It’s so simple it’s genius!
sd insert
Battery Life
Garmin claim the built-in lithium ion battery gives between 4-8 hours of battery life (depending on the conditions you are using it in). I found in practice that I could easily attain 6 hours when driving, so their estimates are not bad. It is worth noting that the Nüvi comes complete with a car mounting kit anyway, which includes a car charger, so the internal battery life is only relevant when using it for other things… As an mp3 player for example I managed to get 5 hours of battery life at reasonably loud volume, which is not at all bad.
The Language Guide
language screen
Using data from the Oxford University Press, Nuvi provides a multilingual word bank, phrase bank, and five bilingual dictionaries.
Travellers can look up and translate more than 17,000 words or 20,000 phrases per language. In practice I don’t know how effective this will be, but from the demo I played with it seemed pretty accurate, and it’s certainly a novelty feature that I have never seen elsewhere on a GPS system.
Travel Guide
The optional Garmin Travel Guide has an absolutely immense amount of travel information on tap including reviews and recommendations for restaurants and tourist attractions.
The information in the guide is integrated with Nüvi's GPS functionality, so you can select a local Hotel, Restaurant or Bar and be guided directly there. What more could you ask for?
I had a quick play with this feature on my review model and found the information to be accurate, and more importantly, interesting: There were several local eating establishments of which I had never heard (although those of you who have read any of my other reviews will know that I have no sense of direction, so this isn’t any great surprise). I even found a new pub half a mile from my house; I’ve lived there 5 years and didn’t even know it existed. I really should get out more.
JPEG Viewer
Why would you want to view pictures on your GPS? Well, if you are holiday and you have your digital camera with you, you can use the Nuvi to view the pictures you have taken during you travels: It’s much nicer to look at your photos on the larger Nuvi screen than on the standard digital camera ‘postage stamp’ screen, and because the screen is bigger, more than one person can view the images at a time.
It’s also a great new way to bore people with your holiday snaps; it’s a portable slide show in your pocket, except you can now fit hundreds of images on one tiny SD card, so the potential to inflict your ‘snaps’ on an unsuspecting audience just increased massively!
Build Quality
I can’t fault this at all. The Nüvi is slim, strong and exudes quality like no other GPS system I have seen to date. It looks like it came from the future (well 3 years into the future anyway). The screen is beautiful, and it’s anti-reflective too, giving a vibrant image that is easy to read in both bright and dark conditions.
Size is important
nuvi vs GO
If you place the Nüvi next to the TomTom GO (as above) for example, the GO suddenly looks like it needs to go a crash diet pronto before it keels over dies from morbid obesity. The Nuvi makes the GO look like the fat, ‘friend’, your girlfriend always had in tow when you first started dating…
The Nüvi is so slim and light that you really can put it in your shirt pocket, unlike many other units that lay claim to this: The Nüvi won’t weigh down one side of your shirt making the other side ride up like you’ve got a hunch-back, and it doesn’t make you look like you have half a house brick strapped to your chest either – this can only be a good thing in my opinion. A lot of other, ‘pocket’, units are designed, I can only assume, for the pockets of clown’s coats, not ordinary, every day shirts; certainly no shirt I have ever owned would comfortable hold a Pocket PC like the PiN 570, and GO (although it doesn’t lay claim to be pocketable) would need a suitcase to car it around; the Nuvi on the other hand just sits and hides quite happily until you need it. Beautiful.
The interface
Navigation is simple, and elegant, with exceptionally clear menus and graphics. All on-screen buttons and icons are massive, and they can easily be selected, even by the largest of fingers.
All the icons are readily identifiable too, and perfectly logical, just as in the other Garmin units like the c320 and c330. This new interface really is something special, and it is so simple that you honestly do not have to read the manual to use it.
Everything about the interface is beautiful; I have said this before about the c320, but I’ll say it again (and again), it has really won me over; it's so simple to use you can't help but fall in love with it. Garmin, I take my hat off to you.
Mapping Display
3d mapping nuvi
Mapping is displayed clearly, in 3D, just as it is on the c320, making interpretation of on-screen information very simple. CitySelect V8 is very well presented with road names clearly marked and POIs easily visible. If you need clarification on an instruction, just a quick glance at the screen is all that’s required.
The Trip Computer
trip computer
Accessing the, "Trip Computer", by tapping the speed indicator in the bottom left of the navigation screen, gives you a very nice representation of an analogue Speedometer, along with lots of other journey statistics; it looks really hi-tech too, so the Geeks out there will probably have it running even when they aren’t using the Nuvi to navigate. It’s worth it just for the rather cool Speedo and distance logging functions in action, plus the Speed is more accurately logged on the GPS than it is in your car, so it’s a function with many uses…
Other features offered are:
* Odometer showing total distance travelled.
* Timers showing duration of journey; time spent moving and time spent standing still (very handy if you are late for work due to a traffic jam).
* Average and Maximum speeds for the journey are also displayed.
You can reset all of these values to zero any time you like (just in case you don't want anyone to know the maximum speed you reached on your journey).
It's an excellent little utility and something the TomTom team didn't even think of on the GO.
Auto Nigh Mode
Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, the display reveals that it has one last trick up its sleeve: It will change itself to, "night time", mode automatically (darken the screen to reduce distracting glare inside the car). TomTom, eat your heart out!
Mapping data
Garmin use Navteq maps, TomTom use TeleAtlas; Navteq maps are, widely regarded as the most reliable by all the major GPS companies these days, so while mapping detail on either is going to be pretty much identical, Garmin have the edge.
How does it perform?
where to screen
I have used it for a week now and I have to say that it has given an excellent first impression. While I have mainly used it for guidance on routes I already know, I have also thrown in some rather obscure locations, to see how well it coped. I found the routes to be accurate and the planning time to be superbly fast.
Entering an Address:
address
Setting a destination is very simple, with Garmin FINALLY including full postcode search. Just tap in the postcode, select the house number and away you go. You can obviously use the City, Street method if you wish, but postcode is most effective for fast address entry.
POIs
POIs
As ever you may add your own POIs and yes, you can add Safety Camera positions from the camera database, so there’s no need to get caught out by the police for going too quickly. Adding POIs is very simple using Garmin rather excellent GSTART program: Just connect the Nuvi, select the POI file and away it goes.
Planning a Route
On a visit to Nottingham, I took the Nuvi through its paces to see how well it would cope with my, ‘unique’, style of driving i.e. having no idea where I am supposed to be going.
The address I entered was found first time, a good start as the TomTom software didn’t even know the street existed, proving that the mapping is slightly better than TomTom in this instance at least; the route was planned quickly and without issue.
Following the directions I was quickly on my way, and making good time too, but as ever, road works stopped my in my tracks. Deviating from the prescribed route didn’t cause any problems at all, the route was recalculated rapidly, taking me through a few villages and than back on to the Motorway at the first opportunity. Recalculation time is fast, and this is important if you don’t want to miss the next available turn to get you back on your route.
Voice prompts are clear, even through the internal speaker, although I wouldn’t recommend listening to mp3s through the internal speaker as it is only Mono, and quite frankly isn’t capable of doing them any justice, If you want music through your card stereo, buy a car stereo adapter. It’s worth it. Headphones sounded superb when using the Nuvi as a walkman incidentally.
Receiver Sensitivity
An incredible cold acquisition time or Time to First Fix, as it's known in GPS land, was attained from the Nuvi. When switched on from cold, straight from the box, the current location was acquired inside of 30 seconds; the SiRF III receiver even works in the house, and to my surprise, inside my friend’s car which has a heated windscreen…
Conclusion
As an mp3 player it is superb, and the fact that music can be played while navigating is a huge bonus.
As a navigator it excels, I would go so far as to say it blows the TomTom GO clear out of the water. True it has no BlueTooth phone connectivity, but for me that is not an issue: I’d rather have a solid, reliable, elegant and sexy GPS that I can carry with my easily that a fat, retro-bubble house brick that doubles as a car kit (and door stop), but that’s just me…
Take my word for it – this is quite simply the greatest in-car GPS you get at the moment.
It’s just brilliant.
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