Improved Mounting

The Garmin Nuvi is billed as a personal travel assistant which we think means its more than an in car GPS navigation package. The specs support this with additional features like MP3 playback and also trying to cross the divide in to being a handheld device. However its fairly quick to see that this is not a device that manages to offer any aviation or marine features and judging by its lack of coordinate input it wouldn’t be much use for geocaching either.

 Accuracy is also a strong point of this new Garmin SatNav, the revised SiRF chipset means that loss of satellite lock is a very rare occurrence which is a good thing as the Nuvi lacks the extra gyroscope or odometer plug in which can keep the map in step during those brief losses during an inner city journey. We did note that there is no multi destination mode which may not concern all users but those who use SatNav to plan a daily route between locations will miss this feature.

 Subsequent trips were equally speedily calculated and seemed in the most part to be the quickest and most obvious routes, which is handy as there is no method to influence the selection criteria of the Nuvi. When you go off route the Garmin Nuvi will try for 3 attempts to get you back onto the original route, this is often achieved by sending you into a side road or asking you to make a U turn, on the 4th attempt it gives up and plots a new route to your destination from where you now are. We are pleased to say the Nuvi also has a detour feature so as you approach the back of a traffic queue you can ask it to reroute for a fixed distance, so “avoid the M25 for 1 mile” is a possible input.

 Traffic info is always a welcome extra and one we hunt for in any new device, this is the next step for SatNav bringing the user real-time data to make journeys easier. Garmin have made the Nuvi compatible with the GTM 10FM TMC receiver. TMC is often available free to air in many European counties, in the UK the system is good news as its supplied with a lifetime subscription to Trafficmaster data.

POI (points of interest) are supported well inside the system and Garmin ship the Nuvi with a POI loader to make it easier to get POI maps made by 3rd parties onto the device. Using the USB connection we managed to hook up the unit and transfer the speed camera map, this was very easy and made some use of the approx 200mb of disk space that’s available on the Nuvi 300 (700mb free space on the 350). The MP3 player works well and we did our best to give it a good test by plugging in an SD card into the Nuvi’s slot and building a few playlists, the screen and interface makes this easy but the inbuilt speaker may be fine for navigation commands but it struggles with music. We’d have to recommend using the audio output and cabling it to your car stereo to make use of this feature.

 Garmin also offer a few extras which you can purchase on SD card, these are based around the mobility of the new smaller unit and are more akin with a PDA than a SatNav system. First there is some basic translation software which should help you speak the local lingo while travelling and then there is a travel guide which may just show you some good places to visit.

 A week with the Garmin Nuvi proved that this model is certainly right up there with the current SatNav offerings from TomTom and Navman and an improvement on the C320 we tested 6 months ago. The slimmer and dare we say sexier Nuvi really does challenger the current TomTom go 300 and if the Traffic feature works as described it could be a winner. Priced at £350 its close to the average price for this kind of system when supplied with UK and Ireland maps, there is a Nuvi 350 which has all of Europe on the device pre loaded and around 700mb of space for extra files / MP3 tracks but this costs £580 which is a lot.

 So our strong recommendation goes to the Garmin Nuvi 300 which at last gives Garmin a real chance of fighting toe to toe with the TomTom Go.

Price: $147.95

GARMIN NUVI 750 CAR GPS 2010 US+CAN...

Price: $124.75

GARMIN NUVI 250W CAR GPS US+CAN 201...

Price: $214.95

GARMIN NUVI 885T CAR GPS NAVIGATION...

Price: $77.95

METALLIC RED GARMIN NUVI 205 GPS 20...

view more items in our store