Garmin nuvi 350By Steve Johnson
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

This is not your father’s Garmin.

Enter their latest consumer gizmo, the “nuvi 350″. And get ready for the specs:

This new “Personal Travel Assistant™” combines a GPS navigator, language translator and travel guide capability, an MP3 player, an audio book player, a currency and measurement converter, a calculator, a world clock, and a digital photo viewer and organizer, all in a slim device. It even comes with a rubber suction cup for sticking to your car windshield.

Aside from its GPS capabilities, the nuvi provides users with a Travel Kit. An optional Garmin Language Guide™ with data provided by Oxford University Press, contains a language translator supporting up to nine languages and dialects, and allowing them translate up to 17,000 words or 20,000 phrases per language.

The Travel Kit also supports the new Garmin Travel Guide™ SD data cards, with information provided by Marco Polo. These guides give users reviews and recommendations of restaurants, hotels, shopping, tourist attractions and nightlife.

But when you’re stuck in a plane or train trying to pass the time away, the nuvi provides you with an Audio Book Player, with content provided from Audible.com, featuring more than 70,000 hours of audio programming from more than 200 content partners.

The MP3 player comes with sample music from AudioLunchBox.com. Songs can be loaded on to an SD card using “drag-n-drop” simplicity. The nuvi has a total of 700Mb of RAM, which is shared with the photo viewer, maps, and audio books.

The nuvi is about the size of a deck of playing cards, and boasts a 3.5-inch color touchscreen. There’s an SD card slot, mini-USB jack, headphone jack, and internal speaker. It’s flip-up GPS antenna also includes an external antenna jack.

Battery life on the nuvi runs about four to eight hours, depending on backlight settings and GPS or application usage. The unit comes with an AC power adapter and 12-volt power cable. The nuvi can also be powered by a PC/USB cable connected to a computer.

Garmin actually has two versions of the nuvi, the “nuvi 300″, available only in Europe, and the “nuvi 350″, available to US markets. The nuvi 350 will be available in November 2005, for a price of nearly $1,000.00. Source: Garmin

Alice says: nuvi is groovy. I want one now. If only it did email. but what’s with all the lowercase n – named products?