| | |  | GPS | Home » » » Garmin Nuvi 350 GPS Vehicle Navigation System | | | | | | | Description: | | Garmin Nuvi is a versatile travel assistant that's approximately the size of a deck of playing cards. This garmin navigator is a portable GPS navigator, traveler's reference, and digital entertainment system, all in one. Combined with detailed maps, the nüvi provides automatic routing, turn-by-turn voice directions, and finger-touchscreen control-making it easy to find your way anywhere. This vehicle navigation system nüvi also offers a travel kit of useful travel tools to help keep any journey fun: MP3 player, audio book player from Audible.com, JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, and calculator. In addition, optional software packages such as the Language Guide and Travel Guide (sold separately on SD Data cards) can be added for language and content support. The new 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 the user's fingertips. This Touch screen navigation system provides traffic alerts (in select cities) when used with a compatible traffic receiver. By adding traffic services and a receiver to your nüvi, you can avoid traffic tie-ups by simply pushing a button to calculate a new route. This gps vehicle navigator supports custom points of interest (POIs) and configurable vehicle icons - fun, customized car-shaped icons in a variety of colors that show your position on the map. Specifications: Receiver: high-sensitivity WAAS-capable GPS receiver by SiRF, Display: 2.8" W x 2.1" H (3.5" diag.), 320 x 240 pixels; bright, TFT display, 64K colors, with white backlight and touch screen, Unit dimensions: 3.87" W x 2.91" H x 0.87" D (98.3 mm x 73.9 mm x 22.1 mm), Weight: 5.1 ounces (144.6 grams). | | | Features: | |
• Garmin nüvi is a portable GPS navigator, traveler's reference, and digital entertainment system.
• Fingertip touch-screen interface.
• Announces the name of exits and streets.
• Rechargeable lithium battery.
• The nüvi provides automatic routing, turn-by-turn voice directions, and finger-touchscreen control-making it easy to find your way anywh
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 3.87 inches | | Product Width:
| 0.87 inches | | Product Height:
| 2.91 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.0 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.7 inches | | Package Width:
| 4.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 4.3 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.0 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 3163 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 3163 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1581 of 1605 found the following review helpful:
 Formerly expensive, but now just fabulousNov 20, 2005
By A's Fan
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
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.
[July 2006 Update]
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.
267 of 273 found the following review helpful:
 My wife is in LOVE!!!Aug 12, 2006
By Larry F. Rogers
And it took an electronic device. LOL.
OK, here is the deal. This product is as good as any GPS I have ever used or seen. It is small and easily carried with you wherever you go (something most of them can't do at all). It can be used in any vehile (caveat, you do not get multiple mounts, but extra mounts can be purchased for $25), and even has pedestrian and bicycle modes. ABOVE ALL it is easy to use, thanks to good software and an excellent touch screen, although a getting started manual would have helped me enormously.
The thing is great at telling you what to do and where to go. There are no second guesses. It says take a right, it highlights the turn graphically and it even tells you the road or route you are turning onto verbally, something most GPS's are missing. Instead of "turn right in .02 miles", you get "turn on to Vista Drive in .02 miles". It even has some landmarks that comfort you along the way.
On of the best features is something my wife experienced on a trip to NY. She is not familiar at all with the roads here on the east coast and was taking a rather long drive to NY to a hotel we had never stayed at. Along the way, she managed to mess up and miss one turn. For her, that could have been a major hassle. I mean, you know what it is like. I have spent as much as an hour getting back on track when I was lucky. Even more time was lost when I wasn't lucky because of detours or road work. One detour in California took me over two hours to recover from on what was originally a 1/2 hour trip. Other GPSs do this too, but this one seems incredibly adept and efficient at it.
When she missed her turn, the system immediately recognized it and redirected her. She lost about five minutes for her goof and didn't have to ask directions or even pause in her travels.
In NY, she used it repeatedly in pedestrian mode to find where she was going. And it worked like a charm even in the confines of all the buildings in NY.
OK, my complaints are why it doesn't get a 5 star rating. Read them closely, because there are ways around a couple of them, but that said, I don't think ANY GPS would get 5 stars from me.
1. There is no "getting started" manual, although it is referenced by Garmin in one of their manuals, it doesn't exist in the package or on the website. All such a manual (which could be one page long) has to say is how to get it working the first time. I will tell you after this how to work around it, but I think it results in a number of these devices being returned in frustration.
2. It does sometimes get confused about the best route. Don't get me wrong, it will get you there and will show you exactly where you are. But when I use it on roads I know, it often isn't optimal. For example, it wanted me to take a road I knew had 10 traffic lights instead of an open freeway in one instance. Or it told me to drive a half a mile out of my way when the left turn onto the highway I wanted was right in front of me.
3. Detour mode is great if there really is a detour. But I accidentally hit this once and there does not appear to be a way to turn it off. I found this incredibly annoying on one trip because I knew it was the best route, but needed details at the end of the trip and the GPS was trying to send me every way but the right way because I accidentally clicked a button. :-(
4. It has an emulation mude allowing it to pre-navigate a trip for you. I thought this would be an INCREDIBLY useful feature. You could practice a complex route before you actually took the trip. But it works at real speed. So emulating a four hour trip would indeed take, well, four hours. Silly indeed. Great for sales demos, but useless for the customer. If someone knows a way around this, it would be a great thing to tell folks.
5. The battery is not customer replacable.
OK, so how do you work around 1? You charge the battery, you go outside to use it the first time under an open sky, and you give it at least five minutes to acquire the satellite positions. It won't work on your couch in the living room unless you are very lucky. It needs at least 3-4 satellites to triangulate your position, and I couldn't get more than one indoors. Outside, it picks up more than enough satellites to get the job done. Oh, and dont' forget to open the antenna. :-)
How about working around 2? Live with it, it is a factor of the mapping software. It ain't perfect, but it is great when you get lost. That one wrong turn is easily corrected. When you are in an unfamiliar area, it really doesn't matter if you use the perfect route anyway in most cases, just that you got there safely. And add to that you always know where you are, and you have something worth every penny. It truly kills the stress factor of driving in an unfamiliar area.
Now 3 is a problem. Don't use the detour feature unless you are absolutely sure you need to take an actual detour. It takes you literally that the route is detoured, and the only way I could find to work around it was to restart the entire trip over from your current location. Something annoying while driving on the highway if you don't have another person in the car to reset it.
For 4, there is no workaround I have found. It makes this mode useless for only the shortest of trips.
For 5, again, you have no workaround. You will have to take it in for service if the battery wears out. IPODs have a similar issue though, so I am used to that. Battery life appears to be 4-6 hours. So when I use it around town or on short trips, I don't even bother to use the cigarette ligher adapter.
Conclusion: Awesome unit. Wins every comparative review I have found. Works great. And gives you peace of mind for you and your family in your travels.
227 of 235 found the following review helpful:
Better than TomTom 910May 05, 2006
By Daniel D. Wambold
"www.ascendiac.com"
I was recently looking to purchase a GPS unit and I had resigned myself to spending approximately $800. The obvious choices presented to me were the Garmin Nuvi 350 and the TomTom 910. For use in the USA, both machines are essentially equally equipped, with large, bright color touch screens and pre-loaded maps. The TomTom also includes maps of Europe, but as I don't intend to travel there anytime soon, this was not a compelling selling feature.
I spent a bit of time in the store using both devices side-by-side. I entered identical destinations and observed how many keystrokes it took to get the machines to recognize the address. The Garmin Nuvi, with a very refined user interface, took significantly fewer keystrokes in most cases. Since the Nuvi allows you to enter the state first, the machine can pinpoint your destination city much more quickly than the TomTom, which requires that you enter the city before the state. As such, you are presented with a (sometimes) very long list of matching cities, which you then must scroll through to find the correct one. Consider, for example, a city name like "Springfield." Once you manage to key in enough characters that the machine can guess the name, it presents you with a list of Springfields, one for each state! There are a lot of Springfields in the US, so you end up wasting considerably time clicking past the ones you don't want.
Now that the addresses were entered (and I was already starting to get annoyed with the TomTom's inefficiency), the machines begin to calculate a driving route. The Garmin found a reasonable route from Paramus, NJ to Cambridge, MA in about 8 seconds, and it took another 5 or so to draw the map and announce the first move. The trip was estimated to require about 3 1/2 hours (reasonable, if not a bit low). On the other hand, the TomTom required more like 30 seconds to calculate the route, plus another 10 or so to draw the map. What's worse, the TomTom told me it would take over 8 hours to reach the destination. Only on a pre-Thanksgiving Wednesday in snow, many years ago, has it ever taken that long!
I figured perhaps some other customer had chosen a route preference that led to this odd path. After searching hopelessly through several poorly labeled menus on the TomTom and failing to see a "shortest distance" or "quickest trip" option, I tried resetting the machine's preferences. Unfortunately, the machine's touch screen registered a finger-touch event right after the reset (I must have brushed the screen accidentally), and it locked in a foreign language I couldn't read. (I guess the first question it asks after a reset is "what language do you want?") There was no "back" button that I could find, and it kept asking additional questions in this foreign tongue. I needed a translator to continue! At that point, there was no sense in playing with the TomTom any further. The user interface was simply one frustration piled on another. Even if they were to update the menu choices to be more logical, the touch-sensitive feature is slightly misaligned, requiring you to press the bottom corner of a button you want in order to get the correct selection. Button presses made in the center of a button often resulted in the button above being chosen. I don't appreciate electronics that waste my time.
The speed of the Garmin's route calculation is more important that simply allowing you to set off quicker, though. If you miss a turn en route, the machine must recalculate your trip so it can correct your path. The Garmin recovers from missed turns quickly enough that it can usually find and announce the correcting route before the next turn. If a machine cannot recover this quickly, you'll simply miss that turn, too, and the machine will set off recalculating another new route. You'll end up in a vicious cycle of missed turns if the machine is off-line for too long. I have not used the TomTom in a car, but given that it was such a laggard in the store, I would want to experiment with it during a missed turn before investing such a large sum.
As for bright light visibility, the Garmin is more than adequate. I have a convertible, and even in bright sunlight with the top down, the Garmin is adequately legible. The built-in speaker, though small, is powerful and clear. Directions are easily audible over the wind and road noise, assuming I've got the stereo at a reasonably low level. The Text to Speech (TTS) feature allowing the unit to speak street names performs well enough to recognize the street without looking at the unit.
The windshield mount worked quite well despite the stiff suspension in my car, my aggressive driving habits, and the fact that it was in the direct sun and heat for several hours today. (The car corners at greater than 0.95g, and achieves about 1.00g in deceleration, which did not so much as shake the unit or the mount. Larger transient forces such as expansion joints also failed to upset the suction cup mount.) The machine snaps in and out of the charger / holder with complete ease.
Garmin's unit is much thinner than the TomTom, and its battery is rated for up to 8 hours of use while unplugged from the car charger (a wall charger is also included). Becaues the unit is so small (think iPod size), it fits easily into a pocket for walking trips, hiking, and biking. It's also very easy to place in a brief case or pocketbook, further protecting your investment when you park.
$800 is a lot of money to spend on a GPS device, but the Garmin has justified the expense with an exemplary machine. With plenty of map data, a very polished and efficient user interface, and simple setup and operation, they have managed to outshine the competition.
As a footnote, I had planned to purchase the Garmin from Best Buy or Circuit City until they told me there was a 15% restocking fee for a returned item. Given the unique nature of this device (you need to like using it IN YOUR CAR, not in the store), this could be quite a loss if you decide against the item. Amazon has no such penalty. However, if you choose the Garmin, I suspect you will never want to send it back! Hope this helps you choose.
UPDATE: After a 1300 mile road trip to Virginia, I am still extremely pleased with the Garmin Nuvi 350. Even gravel side roads off the Blue Ridge Parkway were accurately labeled and present in the map data! No matter where we were, a few taps on the screen brought up a list of nearby restaurants (marked with arrows so you can choose only ones that don't require a U-turn!) or stores. Also, do not underestimate the utility of having a portable, battery-powered device while walking around unfamiliar cities and towns. It's a huge help. In short, this device is a joy to use. Garmin also plan to release Macintosh compatible software in the next several months (according to press releases on their Web site) so that we Mac users will be able to keep our Nuvi's accurate in the future.
Best Regards,
Daniel Wambold, MD
www.ascendiac.com
135 of 141 found the following review helpful:
Very Nice GPSDec 12, 2005
By Electronics Reviewer
After extensive research, I decided to buy either the Garmin 2720 or the Nuvi 350. I wanted reliable maps, ease of use, future real-time traffic expandibility. I decided on the Nuvi because the sensitivity of the GPS antennas is much better in urban environments and the small pocket-sized shape. I have now owned the unit for 2 months and used it extensively. Here are my observations:
1. The antenna sensitivity is outstanding. As a test, the first time I got it, I had the unit "find itself" from within my 2 story house. I was on the first floor and not near a window. While I took a shower, it figured out where it was. In the car, it usually finds itself within 5 seconds. The tangible benefit of this sensitivity is that I don't have to mount the Nuvi on my car dash or window. It just sits on the center console of the car.
2. The maps are very good. So far, it's found every place I searched including little local resturants. The time to calculate (or re-route) based on these maps is very good. I have been able to use the unit straight out of the box without any updates to the software or the maps.
3. The readability of the screen is very good. Even in bright daylight, the screen can be easily read.
4. The speaker on the unit does the job but should be improved. At the higher volume settings the sound is tinny and the cheap little speaker just isn't as clear as it should be. I'm not trying to compare to built-in GPS units from manufacturers like Honda but for $900 the speaker should be better.
5. The internal battery seems to last about 3 1/2 hours with the screen on full brightness. Seems reasonable considering the manufacturer says the battery should last about 4 to 6 hours and we all know how manufacturers over state battery life.
6. The Li-Ion battery is sealed in the unit and can't be replaced by the owner. I don't like this at all. Since this product is reasonably new, there is no detail on how much the battery replacement service would cost. I expect we will get taken to town like Apple with their iPod battery replacements. However, Li-Ion batteries are well regarded so the they should last about 1 1/2 years. We'll see. If anyone from Garmin reads this: Don't do it again. It's not good. Convince your design team that a battery cover with a screw isn't going to take away from the coolness of the product.
7. The software has worked fine. One time it came up with a better route and asked if I wanted to take the new route. However, it didn't say how much shorter or faster the new route would be so I could make an informed decision. Minor detail but if you want me to make a decision, give me some relevant information.
8. The product comes with a quick start guide which is all you really need. There is a product manual but it doesn't get shipped. You can get the pdf from Garmin's web site for free. At $900, I would have expected a paper manual in the box. If you want the paper manual, it's around $10 from Garmin.
9. It comes with the capability to play mp3s and audio books. With the built-in speaker, that is a painful experience. Better to hook-up headphones.
10. One feature that it doesn't have compared to other top-end GPS units is the ability to tell current position in Longitude/Latitude. Minor and not needed but what's the harm? After all there is a screen showing 12 satellite signal strengths and your current elevation.
Overall, I think this has been a good decision. Maybe some of the software issues will be fixed in the future. It is expensive but tangibly better than other GPS units on the market at this time.
377 of 412 found the following review helpful:
Small, perfectly formed, great performance, highly recommendedNov 20, 2005
By Friedman Wagner-Dobler
Not cheap but you get what you pay for. Points of interest: (a) very compact but has the same screen size as the Garmin C3?0 series (b) screen readable in bright direct sunshine (c) Navteq US database - the best - and you can fit all of Europe on a single 2GB SD card (card and European map are extra) (d) North indicator on map (missing on C3?0) (e) the GPS is extremely sensitive and locks on very quickly - I've had it work on the second floor of a three floor building (f) intuitive user interface (g) nicely displayed map (better than C3?0) (h) optional traffic capability. I'm finally selling my NavMan! The only two features that are missing to make it the perfect GPS are (a) dead reckoning capability (b) integral satellite traffic capability - given Garmin's pace of introduction of new products I wouldn't be surprised to see those next year...
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