By: Jim Cyr

Garmin bills this as portable GPS navigator, so we decided to take one out on the road for the weekend to see how it compares to the popular Legend C.

Out of the Box
First thing you see when you open the box is how small the device is. It reminded me of an older generation pocket pc, but posed no problems fitting into your shirt pocket.

The included accessories is the most complete I've seen: Vehicle suction cup mount, AC charger, Vehicle power cable, Dashboard disk, USB cable, Carrying case & Quick reference guide.

There is no manual included with the box, it's stored in the nuvi memory as a PDF. First thing was to plug it in using the USB cable, or any other Garmin USB cable into your computer. The nuvi drive comes up (windows) and you able to view the directory structure. For our road trip, we dragged & dropped GPX files that we needed and since the unit comes pre-loaded with City Navigator, no need to upload map grids from Mapsource.

There is SD card slot, where you can use the Nuvi to view your digital camera pictures on the larger touch screen. You can also play mp3 files, but we never did have time to use it.

Getting Started
Once charged and the car mount installed, The Nuvi is very easy to navigate with. Simply touch the screen and pick "Where To?" and from there you can enter an address or look up your waypoints (from the GPX or from memory) under My Favorites. There is a default setting where you cannot set a new waypoint to navigate to unless you're stopped, but you can turn that off.

Satellite reception was faster and better than my Legend C, it was able to pick up its location while indoors, places where I could never get a signal before.

Driving in a larger City like Halifax was a breeze. The updated map data was able to steer me around town with no problem. The Nuvi also speaks, so it was funny to listen to how "Agricola Street" was pronounced, but otherwise it was pretty good with the audibles. The only peeve is the distance where  you had to make a turn, which is about 40m, 90m on the highway. Depending on your speed, you either made sharp turns.

We found that the 3-d map view worked the best, considering that the 2-d view is what we've come to expect on the Legend C.

But we also wanted to see how it would fair in more rural settings. So we decided to drive out to Prince Edward Island and mounted the Legend C beside it and took off using the same waypoints on each device.


Performance
We noticed that the battery life was about 4 hours when navigating. Having the Nuvi plugged into the car is a necessity when going on longer drives. You can adjust the back light, but we found that we liked having the back light on all the time.

For car navigation, the Nuvi worked very well, especially in rural PEI. The interface was easy and intuitive when selecting a waypoint or by typing an a civic address. Being in the rural setting, it happened on a few occasions that we were being navigated to dirt roads, which look like paved roads on the display.

However, the unit did does not have a Navigation page, which are found on pretty much every handheld device. Also once the unit is within 60-90m, the finish flag icon appears in the "Distance" field. While not a problem when driving, it is not good for other GPS activities like geocaching.

Bottom Line
This device is what you would expect to see someone with a Blackberry. Small, multi functioned and easy to use. Another buzz word would be the "Road Warrior" type, where he/she would be on the road where they constantly need to go to various locations as part of the job.

The short battery life is meant for short distances or using public transit a large city if you were leaving from the Hotel to the meeting.

There is very little do configure on this device and the interface is simple enough for anybody to use. The only time you would need to refer to the manual is to know where to place your GPX files.

Using Mapsource, you can download any saved waypoints along your journey, but cannot download the track file. This might be a problem for those who like to keep track of their track files after a trip.