Garmin nüvi 370 3.5-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator
by Garmin
|
List Price: Our Price: $80.00 You Save: $819.99 (91%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: GPS or Navigation System See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Garmin nüvi 370 3.5-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator
Customer Review: Don't go to Europe with out it!
Summary: 4 Stars
We just returned from Central Europe, where we drove 11 countries. After clothes,passports and a visa card, this item was the most important. It was so important to me, everytime I left the car, I slipped it in my pocket. It saved my so much time finding the right road, making the right turn, finding hotels etc. Right off the bat where we landed in Vienna at dark, it started doing it's job by helping us negoitiate a maze of highways, then narrow streets, directly to our hotel. We use the voice called Jack which was our favorite. Jack was very good at estimating an arrival time, the screen was also very easy to see. There is an amazing amount of information stored inside. Driving in European traffic is not easy, especially Italy. With Jack you are never lost, he is invaluable. I even used it in the pedestrian mode while walking. He got us out of Venice Italy. There we just followed his directions, while I noticed people around me kept checking the map and scratching their heads. I would mark where we parked and Jack would see to it that we found the car when we were done walking the cities. Jack was especially helpful in Krakow, Saltzberg and the previously mentioned Venice. Having the ferries on the map helped too, for instance at lake Como, where not taking a ferry would be a mistake. It is interesting that you can zoom in on a mountain road, and check to see if it is loaded with switchbacks so tight that they don't show on a paper map.
I didn't give Jake five stars for a couple of reasons, although I would have given him 4.5 if I could have. Jack was very simple to operate and intuitive. I would really like a few more simple features, such as elevation, click on map distance feature, and most importantly an indication telling you on each screen the scale of the map. Check your map coverage before you go, some countries in Eastern Europe are not loaded with detail, such as Slovenia, Croatia, and Slavick Republic, to name the ones that I found lacking. I am sure though that you can buy more countries although it was supposed to be loaded with Europe, and those countries are the "new Europe" per Donald Rumsfeld.
I worked perfectly right out of the box. I would recommend the sandbag mount for the dash. It's a little heavier than I like to travel with, but there again it was worth it. It stayed in place, has a nice swivel, and it can easily be detached and set on the floor under the seat to hide it while away from the car.
I used the currency converter several times, but I would suggest you update it before you go. I played around with the blue tooth phone before I left, and it seems like a good feature. I didn' get to use it, because my tmobile cell phone that was supposed to work in Europe didn't.
If your are heading to Europe, take Jake with you without a doubt.
Customer Review: Lifesaver...
Summary: 4 Stars
Recently spent two weeks vacationing in London and throughout Italy. The Nuvi 370 was invaluable, worth every penny we spent. Not only did it let us find gas stations, stores, restaurants, hotels, and most of our destinations fairly easily, the built-in MP3 player, calculator, and unit conversion utility came in very handy as well. For example, since it is portable, we were able to download "walking tours" of Venice and other locations and listen without having to worry about checking paper maps every 10 minutes.
Putting in destinations wasn't that difficult, but there were several times when it took several tries before we could successfully lock in a destination. Apparently, there are several naming discrepancies that the Nuvi couldn't resolve on its own. For example, according to our travel agency, our hotel in Rome was located on a street called "Piazza Di Montecitorio"; however, the Nuvi had the hotel listed under "Monte Citorio," which we eventually discovered after trying for 10-15 minutes. It would be nice if the Nuvi could have suggested other street names instead of giving up. The Nuvi 370 also attempts to pronounce the street names, but it does a poor job of pronouncing names, especially in Italian. I ended up looking at the display anyway because I couldn't understand it most times. I guess this is a minor thing. I recommend saving all of your planned destinations ahead of time (under your Favorites) so that you don't have to waste time putting in new locations when driving or walking.
Italian cities have many narrow alleys between 3-5 story buildings that pass as streets. In the older areas, most streets aren't laid out in an organized way, e.g. few streets follow modern grid patterns with a parallel/perpendicular layout. Moreover, in Italy we didn't see any street signs mounted on poles (at the corner) as we have in the US. Instead, street names are chiseled in hard-to-read print on stone wall markers. After a while, these streets start to look the same, so having a portable GPS can save you from walking/driving around in circles. Note: When you power up the GPS, it takes 1-2 minutes to establish contact with the satellites. If you are in a narrow alley, it can get confused - just walk toward an intersection to re-orient the unit.
Also, signage in Italy was poor in some places, especially outside the city. With the GPS, we were never afraid of getting lost. Asking for directions when you don't speak Italian can be very frustrating; On one occasion, we ended up walking back to the hotel to get the 370 instead of asking random folks on the street. The maps in the 370 are getting dated, but it wasn't really a problem. I highly recommend this unit if you plan to travel extensively in Europe and the States!!!
Customer Review: Good system, but software could be better
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this item about 2 weeks ago. Used it last week when I was travelling in the US.
Nice product, easy to use. But the database of places is quite out of date. For example, it could not pick out the Target store location in Ithaca, or the Wholefoods store at the Time Warner Building in New York.
What worked well: bluetooth worked well. No problems synching - I was using a non-US based 3G Nokia with bluetooth and it synched on first attempt. Satellite acquisition - also worked well. I was in Manhattan as well as upstate New York, and the system worked well always except on one morning when it was raining and under foliaige.
A few improvements would make this an even better product:
(1) show visually the next turn coming up on the main screen. I often had to touch the bottom right of the screen to remind myself whether the next turn was right or left so that I know which side of the road to stay on. I think the Magellen, which I used when I rented Hertz cars, has this feature, which I found very useful.
(2) show the current time on the sub screen on trip data. Currently, it shows only the estimated arrival time, and not current time - this assumes that you know the current time, and that it is the same as that the system is using, which may not be the case. To get current time on the existing system, you have to go back to the main menu.
(3) on the main menu, have a "resume" button. Currently, to resume, you have to press "view maps". It is not immediately intuitive that this gets you back to the nagivation screen, because "view maps" is too generic. It could be labelled "view maps / resume" and that would help.
(4) on the "where to" screen, "intersections" and "address" should be on the same line. For a while, I thought the system was not able to find a location based on intersections, as the option is not available under "address", but is available as a separate option if you scroll down on the "where to" sub screens.
(5) I noticed that the system "lag" when you reach an intersection is quite severe. That is, when the system says you are 100 metres from the intersection, you could only be 70 metres or 50 metres away. So at first I tended to overshoot my turns, but after a while I compensated, and it was OK. If you stop at an intersection, the system "catches" up, so this problem goes away. So if you are new to the system, drive slowly as you approach your turning intersection, and you should be alright.
Other than these wrinkles, it is a good system, and I found it useful and worth the money spent (but wished it had more maps of other countries, especially Asia).
David
Customer Review: Faulty Navagation
Summary: 2 Stars
I recently purchased the Garmen Nuvi 370 for a trip to Italy for Christmas 2007 thinking it would be helpful navigating through Northern Italy over our 16 day holiday. We had plans to drive around Tuscany, with stops in 10 different ancient towns and cities, often with hotels in the city center. I thought this would be handy in the city centers, which I knew from past trips to be confusing, driving challenges.
Fortunately, I brought along the Michelin Italy: Tourist and Motoring Atlas (Michelin Tourist and Motoring Atlas : Italy), which proved to be our savior, "go to" source of navigation information.
The Garmen Nuvi 370 was very disappointing in that it consistently sent us on the most convoluted and least efficient route to our destination. Even if we toggled between logic modes: Fastest vs. Shortest. Often, the directions where just plain wrong, with many bizarre turns and shunts off of main roads when it was clearly signed and obvious we should continue on the road we were on. When we would finally be forced to look at the map and reorient, the map route would have little relation to the Nuvi route. The Garmen also did not recognize many one-way streets or pedestrian only streets, (both very common in old cities), leading us into situations where we could not follow the directions it offered. "Recalculating route" became a joke, except for the fact it usually attempted to take us back to the same one-way street. Even when we tried to use the Garmin in less challenging situations, like freeway travel, it was hard to relax and trust the prompts, knowing the likely hood of it failing was high. It got to the point after, 8 or 10 attempts at using the 370 we just turned it off. It was distracting to listen to the inane prompts while trying to navigate through the tangled web of Italian city streets, particularly when the prompts did not jibe with the map route.
I would not recommend this device unless you are completely helpless with a map and even then don't expect to get to your destination if it is in the city center of an older Italian city. I should have taken my money and bought a cell phone to call the hotels to ask directions.
I have had similar experiences using the Nuvi 370 around the San Francisco Bay area: strange turns and lots of back roads that wander through residential neighborhoods. (Frustrating and even scary in certain parts of the East Bay.) The logic the Garmen uses to navigate still needs lots of work before it becomes a substitute for a good map.
Over all a frustrating and useless device that I should have left at home, along with the bulky and heavy charger, case and plug adapter.
Customer Review: Very useful but needs improvement
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the first GPS I have owned but I have used other GPS before in Rental cars and in-car GPS. Overall I will recommend this GPS.
Review:
1) Maps were quite up to date and Garmin provides the free update for the latest maps for 2008. To get the update one has to register in the Garmin's website and provide the serial number of the device. It takes around a month to get the update from Garmin.
2) Routing is very good but sometime it is slightly incorrect or quirky. The device routes me through two different routes from my home to the highway without any specific reason. Though the distance is very similar, one of the roads has more traffic light and is slower. I am yet to find a reason why the device choses one route over the other on certain days.
3) The text to speech is really useful. You don't have to take your eyes off the road to check the map to make the turn.
4) Bluetooth phone integration works very well. The audio quality is not the best that I have heard but it is definitely better than most of the bluetooth speaker phones. Coupled with that you can enable the Bluetooth "push' feature if your phone allows it. This enables you to see the phone's directory on-screen along with call history. The coolest feature that I have found is to able to listen to the SMS that you receive while driving.
5) Traffic routing works well in my area i.e "San Francisco Bay Area". I have also used the traffic routing in Denver and it worked very well. Although the traffic system needs few updates which I believe is possible since TMC provides these information. The traffic incident report is typically quite vague. It says "slow traffic" or "accumulating traffic" on the highways. It will be much more useful if the actual speed on the highway is also mentioned. I have seen that sometime the slow traffic implies 20 mph and sometime it is 50 mph. It is often very difficult to decide to avoid the traffic bottleneck based on these information. Also the time taken for the traffic information to update is slow. It is almost close to realtime in my experience for building up the traffic delay but it takes way more time to clear the incident report. I think this will help if Garmin includes speed data in the traffic report.
6) The suction mount works well. My car has a flat region on the dashboard so it was much easier to mount.
7) GTM-12 traffic receiver is not integrated in the GPS. Often it is a hassle to connect the traffic receiver.
8) POIs are not that extensive.