New GPS Reviews

Loaded and wide, nuvi 760 has it all ? advanced navigation features, a widescreen display, preloaded maps, an FM transmitter, hands-free calling, traffic alerts and more. Like the rest of the wide nüvi 700-series, its premium navigation capabilities, like route planning and a handy locator, give you peace of mind on the go. Save up to 10 routes, and specify via points and preview simulated turns on the 4.3 widescreen, or enter your via points and let the nuvi 750 automatically sort multiple destinations for an efficient route Hands free calling with Bluetooth phones A trip log of up to 10,000 points keeps a record of where you’ve been on the map for easy reference Speed limits for all major highways and interstates A high-sensitivity internal (non flip-up) antenna keeps the unit sleek and compact while the rechargeable lithium-ion battery allows you to use the unit in and out of the car for up to 5 hours MP3 playback with Audiobook player (subscription to Audible.com required), JPEG picture viewer, and currency converters Built-in FM transmitter allows you to listen to your music, audio books, and gps voice prompts through your car’s stereo] Route avoidance (avoid highways, tolls, etc.), Route setup (choice of faster time, shorter distance, off-road), Auto re-route (fast auto-recalculation when you take a wrong turn or want to avoid traffic), and Custom POIs (ability to add additional points of interest) FM traffic alerts (3 months of service included) Optional MSN Direct, and Garmin Lock (an anti-theft feature) Interfaces - USB, Audio line-out (headphone) Unit Dimensions - 4.8w x 3h x. 8d Weight - 6.2 oz

The Nuvi 760 is a beautiful GPS device. Maybe not quite as sexy as the TomTom 720, but we’ll still take her out. A few immediate differences are seen from the previous top of the line 600 series. First, the face of the device is black. To me, this is an improvement over the previous Nuvi devices not simply from an aesthetic point of view, but it also makes the screen appear slightly easier to read against the high contrast surroundings. We’ve talked about the color of your GPS before and this is a tiny but welcome change.

Another improvement over the 600 series is that the flip-up antenna is gone. No more pulling up the antenna to activate the GPS chip. It does seem to take noticeably longer for the 760 to get a GPS signal each time we turn it on compared to our 300, and 600 series Nuvi devices. Across the top of the device is a slider which turns the 760 on and off, and can serve as a “hold” switch causing the device to ignore touch screen input. That feature can be especially handy for pedestrian use. On the left side is a headphone jack and SD card slot. The maps are loaded in an internal memory so the SD card slot is only needed for additional map coverage or multimedia files, should you desire. Along the bottom is a USB port for connections to your computer, as well as the power/mount connector. On the back is also a connector for an external GPS antenna, should you need one, but you probably won’t.

Navigating to an address is really simple. Power on -> Where to -> Address -> State -> City -> Street Number -> Street Name -> Go. But to be picky, there are a few things I’d like to see changed. I prefer to enter the street name first, then number. And why, oh why, does nearly any GPS on the market today not know that I type “NY” in the state field I want…… you guess…. New York! Again, in fairness most other GPS devices on the market are equally dumb and don’t understand state abbreviations. Instead I’ll just keep having to type N-E-W-Y-space-Y before it knows what I’m taking about.

Again, being really picky, there are two other things I don’t like about the Address entry feature. First, after selecting the city and town there is only one street in my town that begins with the letters “Mon”, yet I need to enter two more characters “Montg” before it will show me that one result. The second is that it isn’t at all accommodating if you make a spelling error. A few other devices on the market are much more elegant when it comes to spelling mistakes.

Finding POIs is just as simple. Where to -> Points of Interest -> select a category, a sub category if applicable, and then look through the resulting list. A nice bonus is that the list will tell you which direction the POI is in relative to your current location. The font size used is good and big, however we would prefer (again, being picky) that the address not be shown on this list instead making room for one more item on the list before you need to scroll. Once you click on a POI the address is shown, making it somewhat redundant in the POI list. Once you find the POI you are looking for, click ‘Go’ and you are on your way.

Steer clear of traffic with an integrated FM traffic receiver designed to receive alerts from TMC Clear Channel about traffic tie-ups and road construction that might lie ahead on your route. All you have to do is simply touch the screen to view traffic details and you’ll be ready to detour around any problem area. And if you end up missing a turn, or you’re forced into a detour that is not relayed through the traffic receiver, the nüvi’s sophisticated automatic routing will get you back on track in no time.

In most areas, TMC Clear Channel traffic broadcasts are continuous — there’s no waiting for scheduled traffic news updates or random alerts. Because traffic broadcasts are received via a “silent” FM data channel, you can still listen to music or news programming on your car radio without interference from incoming FM traffic data transmissions. A 3-month subscription to TMC Clear Channel’s Total Traffic Network is included with purchase of this device. For more information on subscription fees, coverage in individual cities, and traffic data networks in the United Kingdom and Europe, check the Garmin website.

It took a few years, but Garmin finally heard the cry and has given us Multi Destination routing without the need for a big old bulky StreetPilot device. Thank you, thank you, thank you! To create a route with tons of points in it go to Tools -> Routes -> New. From here you can add a starting point, an end point, and lots of points in between. I haven’t yet tried to hit the limit on how many points you can add to a single route, but I’ve been told it is 50. If you need more than 50 points you should probably look into some sort of commercial navigation system anyway.

After you’ve entered in your starting point, your ending points, and intermediate points you can calculate the route and go. You can manually reorder the points in the route, or have them “optimized” by using the ‘Optimally Reorder Points’ function. Yes, the Garmin Nuvi 700 series does include the highly sought after “route optimization” feature many people are looking for. I’ve always been upset with a few GPS manufacturers who offer a feature called “Route Optimization” but it is really “route sorting” where the list is sorted from closest to furthest away, which is often not the most efficient order. However once again, Garmin gets this right and the feature they call ‘Optimally Reorder Points’ is in fact true route optimization.

Note that through the Routes feature, you can now also plan routes in advance by setting a starting location other than your current location. In most other Nuvi devices you could only do that through a complex work around which involves disabling the GPS and then browsing the map to find your starting location. Not anymore! So when would you use this feature? Next week I’m going to a trade-show. I want to know now how far it is from the airport to my hotel. And I might want to plot out a route from the hotel to the convention center. With most of the other Nuvi devices it was an unbearable workaround to get that information. Now I can just take advantage of the Routes feature to set my starting location as a POI (the airport) and then my destination as another POI (the hotel) and preview the route.

As mentioned above, integrated into the power connector is a FM Traffic antenna. Here you can connect to The Clear Channel Total Traffic Network (TTN) to receive live traffic information as it pertains to your route. While we’ve put quite a few miles on our 760, we haven’t yet spent a ton of time in traffic. While we’ve been in an area covered by the traffic service, we haven’t been able to spend time in rush hour traffic to give it a run. However there are not too many unknowns here. The TTN is used on quite a few devices, so we know the service works fairly well. And we can say that we were able to get a connection to the traffic network where a few other devices had dropped in “fringe” areas, so the reception appears to be fantastic.

The navigation screen hasn’t changed much over prior Nuvi versions. The top still has a Green bar with the Next Turn information. At the bottom left is your estimated arrival time, bottom center takes you to the Menu, bottom right shows the distance to the next maneuver, and there are zoom buttons at the top left and top right. I still miss not being able to easily answer someone when they ask me “how long before we get there?” Of course I can look at the estimated arrival time and compare that to the current time. I also wished that the screen would zoom in a little more when there are side streets. Sometimes “straight ahead” isn’t always obvious and in densely packed streets that are not always parallel and perpendicular it is sometimes necessary to zoom in to find which way I want to go. There are nice big zoom buttons though so it isn’t too big of an issue.

Some of you older Nuvi users will notice something else on the screen, a speed limit graphic. When you are driving on a road where the Nuvi knows the current speed limit, that information will be displayed. Most of the limited access highways we drove included speed limit information while most of the city streets did not. But when driving in an unfamiliar area it is nice to just look down and see what the limit is rather than just wondering to yourself when it last was you saw a speed limit sign.

While looks aren’t everything, the Nuvi series devices including the 760 have a beautiful, easy to read map. The colors are vivid, and the font anti-aliasing and shading of elements makes many other devices look like they were drawn by a kid with crayons. What we don’t like as much is that those beautiful graphics seem to come at the expense of a slower screen refresh rate. In contrast to other devices on the market your car icon tends to “hop” down the street a bit more rather than gracefully slide. However you won’t think much of that issue if you haven’t compared it to other faster devices and I don’t find that it inhibits on navigation. As would be expected in a device of this caliber, Text to Speech is offered. The voices haven’t changed that I can tell from previous Nuvi devices. I can hear them just find, however other people have complained to me that the TTS voices are difficult to understand and they end up using a non TTS (recorded) voice for their navigation. I didn’t have any trouble with the TTS voice.

The voice prompting frequency and instruction types were similar to other Nuvi devices. In general we found the prompts to be frequent enough, yet not to chatty in most environments. At highway speeds however (say 55 mph and above) we would have liked to have had much more advance warning of upcoming turns and exits…. say once at 2 miles out and then again at 1/2 mile out. When not watching the map and relying on the voice prompts, you might not always have enough time to switch as many lanes as you need to at highway speeds. There is also an FM transmitter in the Nuvi 760. You can select a station yourself or, in a leg up on the competition, you can have it scan through and try to pick the best station for you, then reporting back what station you should tune your stereo to.

While FM transmitters sound great on paper, be prepared that they don’t always work well. Depending on where in your vehicle the antenna is, what type of an antenna it is, and the availability of “open” stations in your area– your results may vary. In my testing the FM transmitter worked on par, no better and no worse) than most other FM transmitters out there. This makes sense because the output power is regulated by the FCC and they are designed to put out as much power as possible. I’ve seen some FM transmitters underperform or outperform others, possibly due to the antenna location within the device, but the 760 appears to be on average with most devices. In my car I needed to set the volume about twice has high in my stereo as I would ordinarily set it at and there was a bit of static I could hear while the Nuvi 760 wasn’t speaking its sweet nothings to me. I was able to drown out some of that static by having the 760 sing some MP3 music files to be in between navigation instructions.