Lost Begone

This past weekend a friend of mine invited me out to the Hamptons. He fancies himself a real off-road driver and picked me up from New York City in his Jeep Wrangler. When I got in he showed me his newest toy - the Garmin Nuvi 880. His dad had just gotten it for him and he was as excited to test it as I was. What we found was that this unit is in a category all its own. It is far and away the best GPS system I have ever used. While I have traveled with a number of systems that feature voice recognition, none of them had anywhere near the functionality of this system. It was able to understand everything we said every time. Of course, the voice control is just one of the many amazing features of this unit, but that feature alone makes this one of the most impressive pieces of technology I have seen.

The unit itself has a rather impressive appearance. While the screen is large in breadth, the unit itself is rather compact. It is approximately 5 inches wide and 3 inches high but it is only a little more than half an inch thick. The unit is also very light and made it easy to carry around town when my friend insisted that we take it everywhere. The black and gray color scheme is simple and the unit makes a nice addition to the dashboard without calling too much attention to itself.

The screen is an airy 4.3" with a resolution of 480x272. The display is very bright and was easy enough to read both while we were in the car and while we were walking around. The display was even easy to read when we started driving with the top off the Jeep. As the sun dropped and it got darker, the screen automatically adjusted to make nighttime viewing easier.

When we got in the car, we started playing with the unit immediately. Not wanting to touch the owner's manual, we decided to see what we could find on our own. The menus are very intuitive and all the icons are marked clearly. All regular functions can be easily performed without any need to consult the manual.

What makes this system great is that despite the good layout of the menus and general system controls, they are largely useless because of the amazing voice control. Using that method one can avail oneself of 30 different system functions. These include address input, music player control, trip computer control, volume control, and MSN services. The voice system worked incredibly well and was accurate beyond anything I have ever seen. It was a rare occurrence to have to repeat any command and I believe that it only happened twice in the course of the weekend. This was true even when we had the windows open and the radio playing.

The units that I have used previously that also contained voice recognition all had the recognition switch built right into the unit. On the 880, the button to alert the unit of your impending command is located on a remote control, which may be placed wherever you might most easily reach it. To facilitate its placement, the remote comes with a rubber strap. My friend, the serious manual-shifting off-road driver that he is, placed the remote right on the gear selector since it is where he generally rests his hand. He actually placed in on top so that it would work like a joystick thumb trigger. As far as safety is concerned, this means that he has one hand on the wheel and one on the shifter whereas with other GPS units, one of those hands would have to be on the touchscreen.

As with other Garmin units, this one also contains a "Where am I" feature in case of emergency. Pressing this button will display the nearest emergency services as well as your current location. The unit will give you coordinates which you can then relay to emergency services in case you are off-road and not near an appreciable landmark. We tried this twice while we were in the car and were indeed directed to the nearest hospital both times. When we were at home, we used the function to obtain our coordinates and then compared that with the same function on Google Maps and found them to be almost exactly in agreement.

Input of addresses is easy by either voice or typing. When using the keyboard, the 880 uses its predictive text function to speed up the process. To show their attention to detail and personalization, the people are Garmin saw fit to allow the keyboard to be switched between an alphabetical layout and a QWERTY layout.

As the young are apt to do we often changed our destination mid trip and the Nuvi was able to handle this easily with the handy feature that allows you to input extra way points while moving. It also allows for multiple route and trip types. You may choose among faster, shorter, and off-road (the last being the favorite of my friend). The type of trip may be cycled between pedestrian, car, and on foot. The Nuvi was more than smart enough to realize that foot traffic can proceed the wrong way down a street, which was a feature I have yet to see on a mobile GPS system.

The list of points of interest is rather extensive on its own but even that comes with an extra feature on the 880 - the user may add in custom POIs. My friend had already used this feature to add in the location of all the speed cameras that he knew. Within the onboard POI system, there were some categories not always seen on a lower priced unit: gyms, nightclubs, and bars. While we didn't really test many of these out, we did use the POI list to find a new pizza place and are most thankful to the folks at Garmin for introducing us that establishment.

As with many GPS units today, the Nuvi has the ability to connect with other devices. As with other units, it can connect to a Bluetooth enabled phone and the services of that paired phone may be used via the GPS system. The extra feature Garmin added is that the GPS will automatically sync not only your entire address book, but also your call history. Further this system also allows you to make phone calls from within the system directly to any of the phone numbers in the POI list. To make the system even nicer, Garmin included an FM transmitter in the system so that the audio can be sent through the car radio for even better hearing.

Like many other GPS units today that are trying to get exponentially closer to the elusive all-in-one device, the 880 includes many non-guidance features. Unlike many alternative features on other units, some of these are actually useful. Amongst that group are the likes of games, including sudoku, a calculator, and an MP3/audiobook player. Among the less useful features are a picture viewer, world clock, and a unit of measurement converter. While most of these are gimmicks, I actually found the sudoku quite useful when we were waiting for our lunch to come and had nothing better to do.

While walking with the unit, we had a chance to test its battery life. We used it to get from the house to a restaurant nearby and then kept it on as we walked around town. When we arrived home about 5 hours later, this unit was still on and still had some battery left. While we didn't use it constantly, it was on the entire time. This was a little better than the suggested time of 4 hours from Garmin. Were we to have used it more to play games and if we had changed our destination more, I have no doubt that the battery would have drained faster and would have probably been dead within the suggested 4 hour time limit.

All in all, this is an excellent GPS unit. It has many if not all of the features than any other GPS has and the people at Garmin have made each feature a little bit better. All of these pale in comparison to the much improved voice recognition capabilities. That feature is what truly makes this an excellent device and makes it stand out from all the others in the crowd. Of course, it also stands out for its $1000 price tag and so one must decide if voice recognition and the safety inherent in its use are really quantitatively worth quite that much.