Digital Trends

Garmin nuvi 350

January 17th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We plugged the nuvi 350 in, unsure what to expect, and were surprised to find we were using the navigation features just a few minutes later. It turned on, came to the main menu, and once we tapped the “View Map” button then boom, there was our car driving down the street. It accurately told us every street that was coming up and was easy to see from our viewpoint in the driver’s seat.

If you just want to see where you are, the “View Map” function is handy.

From there, we decided to try some addresses. Unlike the ponderous Delphi Nav300, the nuvi 350 was very responsive. Once you tap a key the screen changes instantly or at the most takes one or two seconds, but overall we were very impressed by its responsiveness.

The main screen offers six options: addresses, favorites, food, lodging, fuel, and spell name. The lodging, fuel and food options provide you with a list of those places, starting from closest to your location to farthest away. We used this option several times and the lists are all-inclusive, meaning it was able to find everything that was around us, including off-the-wall or newly built restaurants.

The main navigation menu offers several preset groups, or you can type your own.

The most interesting feature of the main screen is the “spell name” function, as we were at first disappointed to not see a list of book stores, or banks in the main menu. But we found that by typing out whatever we wanted to find, the nuvi 350 was able to find it, including parks, book stores and banks. We were never unable to find a location with the nuvi 350.

Once we had our address entered, the nuvi 350 calculates the route in a few seconds and we were on our way. A bright purple/pink line on the map showed us where we were headed and an Australian female voice guided us to the address. We were surprised to hear the voice at first, and found the option for voices and were surprised to see a long list of options including a British voice, US Americans (both female and male), Spanish, German, Italian, etc.

A bright line shows you the path, with white lines indicating upcoming turns.

One very nice feature of the nuvi 350 is that rather than just telling you, “turn left in .1 mile” it actually tells you the name of the street, which gives you greater confidence that you’re on the correct route. You can also change the car icon from a big car to a dune buggy - which is kind of fun.

We unplugged the unit from our car’s cigarette lighter once it was fully charged, and were pleasantly surprised to find it ran for six hours on its battery.

About the only thing we didn’t like was the lack of a volume dial to change the volume on the fly. To adjust the volume, you have to enter a sub-menu and change the volume from there which is not very efficient.

Our overall impression of the navigation is that it’s pretty much flawless. Easy to use, very fast and responsive, and always got us to our destination.