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After trying other Garmin units, this is the one I kept. Simply incredible. I bought it when it was more than triple its new tag and opinion it was satisfactory deal then. It's a broad 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 generous street names, not unbiased "turn left in 500 feet"; radically reduces how noteworthy you need to gaze at the hide to figure out the true instructions; wouldn't believe a GPS unit wihtout this
3) Gleaming Conceal -- readable in virtually every situation
AND
Faster region of the GPS satellites. This turns out to be quite distinguished in day-to-day consume. In the other systems, it wasn't recent 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 speedy as the unit fully starts up.
One comment on how we exercise this: We don't mount it on the pace board or on the window (which is technically illegal here in California) . Instead we fair lay this on the center console in our van or car. The antenna system is plenty sensitive to work impartial 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 bear even if you unbiased spend 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 search for the city without ever getting lost. Even our kids were able to support enter addreses and catch locations.
Factoring In Added Cost: Objective a warning about upgrade costs. Although Garmin does a great 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 reveal updates about once a year.
And it took an electronic plot. LOL.
OK, here is the deal. This product is as obedient as any GPS I have ever aged or seen. It is shrimp and easily carried with you wherever you go (something most of them can't do at all) . It can be aged in any vehile (caveat, you do not come by multiple mounts, but extra mounts can be purchased for $25), and even has pedestrian and bicycle modes. ABOVE ALL it is easy to utilize, thanks to sterling software and an fine touch veil, although a getting started manual would have helped me enormously.
The thing is astronomical at telling you what to do and where to go. There are no second guesses. It says hold a suitable, 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 proper in .02 miles", you win "turn on to Vista Drive in .02 miles". It even has some landmarks that comfort you along the design.
On of the best features is something my wife experienced on a skedaddle to NY. She is not familiar at all with the roads here on the east hover and was taking a rather long drive to NY to a hotel we had never stayed at. Along the arrangement, 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 mighty as an hour getting attend 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 fling. 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 quit in her travels.
In NY, she ancient it repeatedly in pedestrian mode to net 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 derive a 5 star rating. Read them closely, because there are ways around a couple of them, but that said, I don't reflect ANY GPS would regain 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 glean it working the first time. I will express you after this how to work around it, but I judge it results in a number of these devices being returned in frustration.
2. It does sometimes secure confused about the best route. Don't pick up me gross, it will score you there and will prove you exactly where you are. But when I consume it on roads I know, it often isn't optimal. For example, it wanted me to seize a road I knew had 10 traffic lights instead of an originate freeway in one instance. Or it told me to drive a half a mile out of my device when the left turn onto the highway I wanted was factual in front of me.
3. Detour mode is gargantuan if there really is a detour. But I accidentally hit this once and there does not appear to be a design to turn it off. I found this incredibly annoying on one stagger because I knew it was the best route, but needed details at the demolish of the race and the GPS was trying to send me every plot but the upright procedure because I accidentally clicked a button. 
4. It has an emulation mude allowing it to pre-navigate a stride for you. I notion this would be an INCREDIBLY useful feature. You could practice a complex route before you actually took the stagger. But it works at valid rush. So emulating a four hour perambulate would indeed assume, well, four hours. Funny indeed. Spacious for sales demos, but useless for the customer. If someone knows a contrivance around this, it would be a grand thing to divulge folks.
5. The battery is not customer replacable.
OK, so how do you work around 1? You charge the battery, you go outside to expend it the first time under an start sky, and you give it at least five minutes to glean 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 status, and I couldn't score more than one indoors. Outside, it picks up more than enough satellites to accumulate the job done. Oh, and dont' forget to originate 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 sizable when you net lost. That one dismal turn is easily corrected. When you are in an weird station, it really doesn't matter if you employ the perfect route anyway in most cases, fair 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 unusual station.
Now 3 is a quandary. Don't utilize the detour feature unless you are absolutely obvious you need to grasp an dependable detour. It takes you literally that the route is detoured, and the only plan I could acquire to work around it was to restart the entire mosey over from your unusual position. 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 choose it in for service if the battery wears out. IPODs have a similar deny though, so I am ragged to that. Battery life appears to be 4-6 hours. So when I expend it around town or on short trips, I don't even bother to exhaust the cigarette ligher adapter.
Conclusion: Awesome unit. Wins every comparative review I have found. Works enormous. And gives you peace of mind for you and your family in your travels.
I was recently looking to rob a GPS unit and I had resigned myself to spending approximately $800. The positive choices presented to me were the Garmin Nuvi 350 and the TomTom 910. For utilize in the USA, both machines are essentially equally equipped, with big, quick-witted color touch screens and pre-loaded maps. The TomTom also includes maps of Europe, but as I don't intend to move 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 net the machines to see 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 station first, the machine can pinpoint your destination city remarkable more posthaste than the TomTom, which requires that you enter the city before the situation. As such, you are presented with a (sometimes) very long list of matching cities, which you then must scroll through to pick up the true one. Deem, 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 station! There are a lot of Springfields in the US, so you destroy up wasting considerably time clicking past the ones you don't want.
Now that the addresses were entered (and I was already starting to bag annoyed with the TomTom's inefficiency), the machines inaugurate 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 blueprint the method and insist the first fade. The high-tail was estimated to require about 3 1/2 hours (reasonable, if not a bit extreme) . On the other hand, the TomTom required more like 30 seconds to calculate the route, plus another 10 or so to scheme the procedure. What's worse, the TomTom told me it would catch over 8 hours to arrive 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 exclusive path. After searching hopelessly through several poorly labeled menus on the TomTom and failing to examine a "shortest distance" or "quickest traipse" option, I tried resetting the machine's preferences. Unfortunately, the machine's touch camouflage registered a finger-touch event moral after the reset (I must have brushed the cloak accidentally), and it locked in a foreign language I couldn't read. (I guess the first query it asks after a reset is "what language do you want? ") There was no "abet" button that I could win, 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 salvage the right selection. Button presses made in the center of a button often resulted in the button above being chosen. I don't like electronics that raze my time.
The rush of the Garmin's route calculation is more famous that simply allowing you to site off quicker, though. If you miss a turn en route, the machine must recalculate your fling so it can suitable your path. The Garmin recovers from missed turns snappily enough that it can usually come by and converse the correcting route before the next turn. If a machine cannot recover this rapidly, you'll simply miss that turn, too, and the machine will residence off recalculating another unique route. You'll destroy up in a vicious cycle of missed turns if the machine is off-line for too long. I have not ragged 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 stout sum.
As for radiant light visibility, the Garmin is more than adequate. I have a convertible, and even in gleaming sunlight with the top down, the Garmin is adequately legible. The built-in speaker, though tiny, is considerable and distinct. Directions are easily audible over the wind and road noise, assuming I've got the stereo at a reasonably shameful level. The Text to Speech (TTS) feature allowing the unit to yell street names performs well enough to ogle 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 convey 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 powerful 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 remarkable thinner than the TomTom, and its battery is rated for up to 8 hours of expend while unplugged from the car charger (a wall charger is also included) . Becaues the unit is so dinky (consider iPod size), it fits easily into a pocket for walking trips, hiking, and biking. It's also very easy to residence in a brief case or pocketbook, further protecting your investment when you park.
$800 is a lot of money to exhaust on a GPS design, but the Garmin has justified the expense with an exemplary machine. With plenty of arrangement 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 grasp the Garmin from Best Prefer or Circuit City until they told me there was a 15% restocking fee for a returned item. Given the recent nature of this way (you need to like using it IN YOUR CAR, not in the store), this could be quite a loss if you settle against the item. Amazon has no such penalty. However, if you decide the Garmin, I suspect you will never want to send it wait on! Hope this helps you settle.
UPDATE: After a 1300 mile road race to Virginia, I am collected extremely joyful with the Garmin Nuvi 350. Even gravel side roads off the Blue Ridge Parkway were accurately labeled and point to in the diagram data! No matter where we were, a few taps on the mask brought up a list of nearby restaurants (marked with arrows so you can resolve only ones that don't require a U-turn!) or stores. Also, do not underestimate the utility of having a portable, battery-powered draw while walking around irregular cities and towns. It's a gigantic wait on. In short, this scheme is a joy to expend. Garmin also view to release Macintosh compatible software in the next several months (according to press releases on their Web situation) so that we Mac users will be able to support our Nuvi's lawful in the future.
Best Regards,
Daniel Wambold, MD
www.ascendiac.com
