Reviews: Garmin nüvi 360 GPS

If you find yourself pulling out your hair looking over street maps and atlases as you travel, you may want to consider acquiring a handy GPS unit. GPS which stands for "Global Positioning System" helps track your location via satellite and then map out routes to destinations. Today GPS is standard on many cell phones, and is a nice built-in feature of the iPhone. As for driving and traveling a lot on foot, we suggest you consider the Garmin nüvi 360 GPS GPS unit. The Garmin Nuvi 360 is a great travel companion GPS which provides vivid, detailed color maps as well as spoken directions to instruct you while driving. This text-to-speech model features a 3.5 inch screen, wireless Bluetooth technology (to make hands free cell phone calls), as well as a JPEG photo book and MP3/Audio book player. There's even a travel alarm and currency converter built in. Weighing in at just about a pound it makes for a convenient travel accessory, whether traveling on foot or by car.

Garmin nuvi 360 features:

- Bluetooth wireless technology, built-in microphone, and speaker for hands-free calls with compatible phones.

- MP3 player with pre-loaded sample songs and audio books, JPEG picture viewer, travel alarm, and currency converters.

- 2D or 3D views; pre-loaded with most recent Navteq-driven maps for United States, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Canada.

- Turn-by-turn directions with actual street names; real-time traffic and weather info
Super-bright 2.8 x 2.1-inch sunlight-readable color screen.

- SD card expansion slot for adding more features such as language or travel guides.

With the Garmin Nuvi you simply enter the address of your destination and you're ready to go! Plug the unit into your cigarette lighter, attach its suction cups to your windshield and you have a nice personal navigator along for the ride! The nuvi's 3.5 inch screen has a detailed map which you can zoom in or out on, that shows your cars location as it moves. You also have the great added option of having the nüvi provide speech turn by turn directions. For example, it will tell you to bare right in 5 miles, then stay on Route 40 for 25 miles. The directions are spoken clearly moments ahead of when you'll need to use them, and then right before. There's also an option for seeing text directions to get to your location much like you'd see on Mapquest.com.

One of the great features this unit has is the ability to enter destinations or locations ahead of time and store them for future use. Say for example you're staying at a hotel in Houston, TX. You can input its address for storage, and then type in other addresses you plan to visit, such as a relative's home, a steak house, theater, club, etc. Once you need to get somewhere, the address is already stored and ready to assist you in finding your way to and from the location. The Garmin nüvi 360 GPS even has a feature to allow you to simulate a driving route. It will give an estimated time the trip will take and show you the map of the driving route. This can help plan ahead the day before a trip.

The nüvi has a great array of info already available in it which could help if you're visiting a new area and want to find a place to eat or an attraction to check out. If for example you were in Miami and wanted to find a great nearby seafood restaurant, you would head to the nüvi's "Places of Interest" menu option. It will list out all nearby seafood restaurants by how many miles they are from your current position. Simply press on the restaurant you'd like and nuvi will help you get there! Even better if you own a compatible bluetooth-enabled mobile phone, the nüvi allows you to look up phone numbers from its database of over 6 million points of interest. Press the number to dial and enjoy hands-free dialing, with the nüvi acting as your phone!

Overall the Garmin nüvi 360 GPS is a great GPS unit for travelers and it receives the Dirt Cheap Tickets Travel Blog stamp of approval! There were only a few instances where errors were made using the device, and this was largely human errors of not keeping up with the nüvi. It provides more than adequate assistance for finding your way to wherever your headed, offers additional comfort/entertainment features, and at a price under $200 makes for an invaluable travel companion!

Purchase the Garmin nüvi 360 GPS at Amazon.com for an affordable price.