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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 trace and understanding it was obliging deal then. It's a huge 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 honorable street names, not fair "turn left in 500 feet"; radically reduces how great you need to see at the camouflage to figure out the steady instructions; wouldn't believe a GPS unit wihtout this
3) Vivid Cover -- readable in virtually every situation
AND
Faster area of the GPS satellites. This turns out to be quite well-known in day-to-day utilize. In the other systems, it wasn't modern 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 hasty as the unit fully starts up.
One comment on how we exercise this: We don't mount it on the trot board or on the window (which is technically illegal here in California) . Instead we honest lay this on the center console in our van or car. The antenna system is plenty sensitive to work unprejudiced 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 absorb even if you unbiased exercise 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 seek the city without ever getting lost. Even our kids were able to support enter addreses and rep locations.
Factoring In Added Cost: Honest a warning about upgrade costs. Although Garmin does a suitable 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 yell updates about once a year.
And it took an electronic way. LOL.
OK, here is the deal. This product is as kindly as any GPS I have ever former 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 faded in any vehile (caveat, you do not gather 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 obedient software and an great touch mask, although a getting started manual would have helped me enormously.
The thing is gigantic at telling you what to do and where to go. There are no second guesses. It says bewitch a moral, 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 honest in .02 miles", you bag "turn on to Vista Drive in .02 miles". It even has some landmarks that comfort you along the blueprint.
On of the best features is something my wife experienced on a slouch to NY. She is not familiar at all with the roads here on the east flit 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 worthy as an hour getting succor 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 wobble. 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 end in her travels.
In NY, she venerable it repeatedly in pedestrian mode to rep 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 salvage 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 pick up 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 bag it working the first time. I will yelp you after this how to work around it, but I assume it results in a number of these devices being returned in frustration.
2. It does sometimes find confused about the best route. Don't derive me foul, it will gain you there and will reveal you exactly where you are. But when I employ it on roads I know, it often isn't optimal. For example, it wanted me to capture 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 arrangement when the left turn onto the highway I wanted was suitable in front of me.
3. Detour mode is grand if there really is a detour. But I accidentally hit this once and there does not appear to be a diagram to turn it off. I found this incredibly annoying on one lag because I knew it was the best route, but needed details at the demolish of the accelerate and the GPS was trying to send me every draw but the honest device because I accidentally clicked a button. 
4. It has an emulation mude allowing it to pre-navigate a jog for you. I conception this would be an INCREDIBLY useful feature. You could practice a complex route before you actually took the roam. But it works at staunch bustle. So emulating a four hour toddle would indeed choose, well, four hours. Funny indeed. Tall for sales demos, but useless for the customer. If someone knows a procedure around this, it would be a huge thing to notify folks.
5. The battery is not customer replacable.
OK, so how do you work around 1? You charge the battery, you go outside to exhaust it the first time under an originate sky, and you give it at least five minutes to obtain 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 area, and I couldn't score more than one indoors. Outside, it picks up more than enough satellites to catch the job done. Oh, and dont' forget to begin 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 enormous when you procure lost. That one contemptible turn is easily corrected. When you are in an unusual plot, it really doesn't matter if you utilize the perfect route anyway in most cases, impartial 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 location.
Now 3 is a plight. Don't exhaust the detour feature unless you are absolutely obvious you need to bewitch an right detour. It takes you literally that the route is detoured, and the only diagram I could acquire to work around it was to restart the entire meander over from your recent 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 rob it in for service if the battery wears out. IPODs have a similar affirm though, so I am old-fashioned to that. Battery life appears to be 4-6 hours. So when I spend it around town or on short trips, I don't even bother to expend the cigarette ligher adapter.
Conclusion: Awesome unit. Wins every comparative review I have found. Works broad. And gives you peace of mind for you and your family in your travels.
I was recently looking to buy a GPS unit and I had resigned myself to spending approximately $800. The definite choices presented to me were the Garmin Nuvi 350 and the TomTom 910. For exercise in the USA, both machines are essentially equally equipped, with broad, quick-witted color touch screens and pre-loaded maps. The TomTom also includes maps of Europe, but as I don't intend to depart 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 earn the machines to observe 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 location first, the machine can pinpoint your destination city powerful more posthaste than the TomTom, which requires that you enter the city before the space. As such, you are presented with a (sometimes) very long list of matching cities, which you then must scroll through to bag the accurate one. Mediate, 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 dwelling! There are a lot of Springfields in the US, so you slay up wasting considerably time clicking past the ones you don't want.
Now that the addresses were entered (and I was already starting to earn 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 way the draw and shriek the first depart. The scurry was estimated to require about 3 1/2 hours (reasonable, if not a bit uncouth) . On the other hand, the TomTom required more like 30 seconds to calculate the route, plus another 10 or so to contrivance the arrangement. What's worse, the TomTom told me it would grasp over 8 hours to advance 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 irregular path. After searching hopelessly through several poorly labeled menus on the TomTom and failing to gaze a "shortest distance" or "quickest trudge" option, I tried resetting the machine's preferences. Unfortunately, the machine's touch camouflage registered a finger-touch event lawful after the reset (I must have brushed the mask accidentally), and it locked in a foreign language I couldn't read. (I guess the first put a question to it asks after a reset is "what language do you want? ") There was no "attend" button that I could regain, 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 find the legal selection. Button presses made in the center of a button often resulted in the button above being chosen. I don't luxuriate in electronics that extinguish my time.
The hurry of the Garmin's route calculation is more significant that simply allowing you to location off quicker, though. If you miss a turn en route, the machine must recalculate your flow so it can good your path. The Garmin recovers from missed turns mercurial enough that it can usually procure and sigh the correcting route before the next turn. If a machine cannot recover this fast, you'll simply miss that turn, too, and the machine will space off recalculating another recent route. You'll destroy up in a vicious cycle of missed turns if the machine is off-line for too long. I have not frail 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 big sum.
As for lustrous light visibility, the Garmin is more than adequate. I have a convertible, and even in quick-witted sunlight with the top down, the Garmin is adequately legible. The built-in speaker, though exiguous, is mighty and positive. Directions are easily audible over the wind and road noise, assuming I've got the stereo at a reasonably indecent level. The Text to Speech (TTS) feature allowing the unit to sing street names performs well enough to examine 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 say 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 worthy 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 noteworthy thinner than the TomTom, and its battery is rated for up to 8 hours of exercise while unplugged from the car charger (a wall charger is also included) . Becaues the unit is so diminutive (deem iPod size), it fits easily into a pocket for walking trips, hiking, and biking. It's also very easy to location in a brief case or pocketbook, further protecting your investment when you park.
$800 is a lot of money to use on a GPS design, but the Garmin has justified the expense with an exemplary machine. With plenty of blueprint 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 catch the Garmin from Best Occupy or Circuit City until they told me there was a 15% restocking fee for a returned item. Given the modern nature of this map (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 determine the Garmin, I suspect you will never want to send it assist! Hope this helps you decide.
UPDATE: After a 1300 mile road promenade to Virginia, I am level-headed extremely gay with the Garmin Nuvi 350. Even gravel side roads off the Blue Ridge Parkway were accurately labeled and note in the arrangement data! No matter where we were, a few taps on the camouflage 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 procedure while walking around strange cities and towns. It's a expansive encourage. In short, this scheme is a joy to employ. Garmin also understanding to release Macintosh compatible software in the next several months (according to press releases on their Web plot) so that we Mac users will be able to sustain our Nuvi's moral in the future.
Best Regards,
Daniel Wambold, MD
www.ascendiac.com
