Late last night, PC Magazine's Craig Ellison, our friendly neighborhood GPS guru, got his hands on a Nuvi 350 (with SiRFStarIII) (more photos here) that's been preloaded with US data. For those of you that know the Nuvi 350, you also know you can't buy it preloaded with US maps (yet). He's writing up his review now for PCMag.com, but let it suffice to say, he's very pleased with its performance.
It's important to note that you can only buy the Nuvi 350 preloaded with European maps (sporting either regional maps only, in the Nuvi 300, or all of Western Europe, in the Nuvi 350). But as of yet, a US version is not available, but if you buy the Euro version, you can load it yourself with US maps (with a City Navigator North America SD card). And that's exactly what Garmin did for the testing version that Craig has in his hands.
As we already know, the Nuvi 350 is packed with an A/C charger and approximately 1 GB of internal memory for storage of supplemental maps, MP3s, and audio books. With the optional language pack, the Nuvi 350 can speak nine languages. Due to budget constraints, we had to let our linguistics department go here at GearLog, so we were only able to test the English and the German (we have a German lab guy, so there).
Considering how lazy we are here at GearLog.com, we don't want to manually load US maps into a European Nuvi 350. (We'd rather spend our time whinging about the video iPod and the OQO Model 01+ mini-PC.) So, we're avidly awaiting an announcement from Garmin about the US Nuvi (more photos here), that we're told, will be made soon. Real soon. (Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge.)
David Coursey's Comment: This looks like a device designed for the European briefcase traveler market--someone who doesn't drive much and takes planes, trains, and taxis from place to place. Looks like it would be painful to use while driving (something I do a lot of) and the 3.5-inch (diagonal) screen seems small. I'd want mine with real buttons rather than a touchscreen-only user interface. Preloaded maps or not, there's no way I'd drop nearly $1000 for one of these.
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November 10, 2005 2:57 PM
I saw a unit (demo only) at Staples that looks exactly like this one by Garmin. It was called Finderive and the demo was very impressive. So much so, that I put myself on the waiting list and their introductrory price is only $499.99. I have looked at many units, Garman, Tom Tom, Magellan and others and find this an excellent unit from the many options it offers, not the least text to speech capability. The interface looked very clean and easy. I like the battery function too very much and it can be used on vacations to Europe. Even includes as an option a language converter (spoken via the built in speakers) and a measurement and money converter. It looks like a real winner to me. Screen is bigger that most Garmins too and very clear (inside the store).
January 12, 2006 2:13 PM
Just found out over at another blog that they have some sort of blog for this bad boy: http://nuvi.blogs.com you can even win one by signing up during CES http://www.garmin.com/nuvicontest/ I think this is the U.S. announcement for it.
January 12, 2006 2:14 PM
Just found out over at another blog that they have some sort of blog for this bad boy: http://nuvi.blogs.com you can even win one by signing up during CES http://www.garmin.com/nuvicontest/ I think this is the U.S. announcement for it.