Product Description

The Ultimate Travel Companion - The nüvi 300 is a portable GPS navigator, traveler's reference, and digital entertainment system, all in one.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16092 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Garmin
• Model: Nuvi 300
• Released on: 2005-11-25
• Dimensions: .32 pounds

Manufacturers Description

Introducing the Nüvi: A versatile travel assistant that’s approximately the size of a deck of playing cards.

The Nüvi 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.

Travel Kit™
The 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.

Language Guide™ software (optional)
Users can access an optional Garmin Language Guide, with data provided by Oxford University Press. This software suite contains a multilingual word bank, phrase bank, and five bilingual dictionaries. The multilingual word bank and phrase bank supports nine languages and dialects, including American English, British English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, European Spanish, and Latin American Spanish. The Language Guide lets travelers look up and translate more than 17,000 words or 20,000 phrases per language. Through the unit’s text-to-speech interface (offered only on the nüvi 350), users can get a spoken pronunciation of each entry in the word bank—along with gender and part-of-speech information

Travel Guide™ software (optional)
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.

Travelers can use the Nüvi to navigate to an address or search points of interest (POIs)—places like hotels, restaurants, shopping, and tourist attractions. The Nüvi automatically calculates the fastest route and provides voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions along the way. Thanks to the Nüvi’s text-to-speech functionality, the unit audibly announces the name of upcoming streets—letting drivers keep their eyes on the road while navigating through busy traffic and tricky roadways. If users stray off course, the Nüvi automatically calculates the quickest way to get back on track.

Traffic
The Nüvi even 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.

The Nüvi also 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.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Near perfect in form and function - sat nav has come of age!
This sat nav is about the size of one of those slimline digital cameras and, it is therefore, genuinely pocketable. This is a great advantage now that criminals seem to be picking on sat nav owners who leave their units or mounting hardware on display.

The touchscreen is large, clear and responsive and the operation is so intuitive that you don't really need a manual to get going. I have had it a week or so now and have found the navigation to be precise and on the one occasion it led us astray I discovered the "include unmade roads" option was engaged. Once adjusted it was fine. Also, if you deviate from the suggested route it recalculates an alternative in seconds.Compared to other devices it is also equally quick at "cold fixes" e.g. finding enough satellites to get up and running from switch on - many of my friends tell me their units can take several minutes - the Nuvi is "locked on" in less than half a minute.

Battery life on internal batteries is around 3-4 hours and the quality of both the maps and the voice is good - although no doubt a bigger unit would probably have a more "mellow voice" (but of course wouldn't be pocketable). The volume is adequate even at speed.

I was sceptical of the quality of the other functions such as the picture viewer etc. - my thinking being - "jack of all trades and master of none" - don't be fooled, this is a top flight product. Yes, to meaningfully replay MP3s the internal speaker is no good but you can get lots of solutions to connect it to your car audio. The unit also accepts speed camera databases that can be downloaded from the internet - they work really well.

It comes complete with quality mountings, leads including a cigarette lighter adapter and a neat little leather case (although I decided to buy a Lowe Pro Rezo 15 case which could have been made for it).

Truly, you won't regret buying this small, perfectly formed, versatile and high performing device. Well done Garmin!

A little gem
Ok, so I'm a satnav newbie - what do I know?

Well, I know enough to work out that I only want to pay for the the features I need and that I should read as many reviews on the net about my shortlisted potential buys.

So now you know what led me to the Garmin 300 - how did it turn out for me?

Well, the unit was actually bought by my daughter who was moving from Guernsey to Liverpool and wanted the in-car reassurance of knowing where she was going. Out of the box, the unit was everything the reviews promised. Small, portable, and incredibly easy to set up and use.

We trialled the unit in Guernsey for a week - yes, Garmin is the only company to cover the Channel Islands as far as I know - and got used to how it works. I even deliberately went off route a few times but calmly and quickly got given new directions to my destination, even if it did sound a little tetchy about recalculating. Some reviews moan about the 3D maps but we had no difficulties. Like everything new, it takes a little getting used to but the effort is minimal.

On the big trip up to Liverpool the unit quickly picked up it's satellites as we emerged from the ferry and took us the 349 odd miles without a hitch. Well yes, we did have one small power down panic ( battery low) but that was our fault in not checking the lighter power lead was plugged in properly. We had been running it on battery for about 4 hours prior to this event without any problems.

As soon as we sorted out the lead and reset the unit, it remembered where we were going and continued on as if nothing had happened. It did direct us to about 10 houses away from the actual address but it was based on a post code entry and what is a few yards inaccuracy over nearly 350 miles. Anyway, buying a satnav doesn't mean switching off your common sense.

A brilliant piece of kit and well worth the price if you are looking for a basic satnav unit. I was wondering why less and less visitors are getting lost in Guernsey these days!

WOW
Well, where do I start. I will keep this short as Ive never felt the need to do this before but I was sooo impressed with this device (and so is my husband who bought this for me) I had to share this.
It is simple to use, dynamic, will correct a course automatically if you decide to go a different route, instructions are clear... again 'simple to use, your granny could get it to work'.
My husband is a courier and he though he knew most routes in and out of London, until now. He was using this for a trip to a place he kinda knows but the Nuvi took him a different route, he was tempted to not take that route and follow his instincts but gave it a go... it only found him a dual carriageway past all the traffic he didn't know about. He has since used this for other more remote drops and cant praise this enough.
Reason I am impressed, its easy and quick to use, I can get lost at the drop of a hat OR I go the longest route as its the only one I know, using this for a recent shopping trip took at least an hour off my journey as I found a parking space outside the shop I wanted to visit and it took me home from there, Im just so please and can honestly say, it has changed my driving life, I wont worry about travelling to any unknown place ever again.