Garmin nuvi 760

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/handhelds/0,39030065,49294985,00.htm

Reviewed 10 January 2008

Reviewed by Brett James

The Garmin nuvi 760 boasts quality right through to its core. It retains the previous nuvi products' ability to integrate powerful features inside an easy to use interface and is a close second to TomTom for instant routing out the box. Price-wise, you can get the nuvi 760 for around £260 online.

Strengths
The nuvi 760 not only looks stylish with its new black finish and high quality, 109mm (4.3-inch) display but it also emanates sheer excellence the moment you turn on the device via the handy sliding on/off switch located at the top of the screen. The latter also incorporates a hold function which prevents the screen from being activated, which is handy for pedestrian use.

Two large icons are available upon start up -- a 'Where to' and 'View Map', with a smaller 'Tools' icon at the base which allows access to the various utilities on offer (MP3 player, calculator and the list goes on).

Entering the simple 'Where to' menu takes care of all your navigational requirements, such as address inputs, POI, favourites, plus the handy Extras option that houses any custom POI or travel guides you may have installed.

Inputting destinations is also fast and fluid, thanks to the Qwerty keyboard, which can be conveniently used one handed.

During our tests, the maps looked superb and came with some neat little touches for enhancing the driving experience, such as a car symbol to replace the standard directional pointer and trip logs.

Voice directions were spoken clearly and it does feature text-to-speech for pronouncing road names, which is extremely useful for navigation around round-abouts or complex junctions.

Initial route calculations were generally quick and the included FM/TMC transmitter connects to the side of your car cradle as a one piece solution.

With the TMC you get a lifetime traffic subscription to the UK service and it picked up traffic hot spots pretty quickly. The FM receiver tapped into our car's spare radio frequency for routing directions through the car speakers. Background interference was evident but kept to a minimum.

The supplied safety camera database gave us both visual and audible warnings of approaching cameras. Yearly updates cost around £30.

Weaknesses
The Garmin nuvi 760 does not have that many flaws, but like the nuvi 250W it has problems with its GPS acquisition performance.

Locating our position indoors takes several minutes and outdoors in overcast skies you are looking at over a minute from a warm start.

In clear skies it's much faster and once it had a signal it could maintain our position well, though for the first five minutes of testing the re-route calculations -- which come into play when we went off our chosen route -- could have been faster, but it only seemed to effect the 3D map view (possibly due to its higher graphical detail). However, the Garmin product is capable of receiving updates, so we are confident that these early issues will be resolved.

Conclusion
Garmin has produced a near perfect sat-nav device but is let down mainly by its location acquisition time and 3D map re-route calculations. The TMC/FM receiver performed well during our tests and the text-to-speech option was great. For sheer ease of use and expansion from third party vendors, the Garmin nuvi 760 should be high on your shopping list.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday