Garmin nüvi 3450 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator Reviews
Garmin nüvi 3450 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
- Automatic dual-screen orientation
- Speed limit indicator
- Lane assist with photoReal junction view
- Less than 9mm thick
- multi-touch glass display with pinch to zoom
Thanks to Garmin Guidance 3.0, nüvi 3450 offers the most advanced mapping capabilities available. And at just 9 mm, it’s also our thinnest navigator yet.
Navigate with 3-D Terrain Garmin Guidance 3.0 allows you to quickly look up addresses and services and be guided to your destination with voice-prompted, turn-by-turn directions that speak street names. It comes preloaded with maps that feature 3-D landmarks and terrain for North America. It also comes preloaded with more than 8 million points of interest and offers the ability to add your own. Know the Lane Before It’s Too Late Now there’s no more guessing which lane you need to be in to make an upcoming turn. Available in select metropolitan areas, photoRea
List Price: $ 329.99
Price: $ 256.80
GPS with Customer Reviews
HK "GK"
January 15, 2012best Garmin of the past 2-3 years,
“Best Garmin” doesn’t mean perfect. It’s a new model, so bugs are visible every day. It fails to calculate pretty much every route from Brooklyn to Manhattan due to (what it seems to be) a mapping bug on one of the highways. So I have to drive up to the critical point and navigate from there. I’ve seen people having similar problem in other parts of the country and this also is an issue with other models from the new line-up (tested on 2495). My expectation is that this will be fixed soon as it’s not really acceptable.
The most recent firmware update also introduced a curious bug where the unit occasionally reboots itself if I miss a turn.
I also had problems registering it because Garmin communicator plug-in couldn’t see it on my PC. If you have the same problem, it should be easily solvable, see comments to this post.
Sometimes it also restarts during voice recognition. No big deal, really.
Map detail is still inadequate. In 2D view most highways will not be labeled, which makes selecting a point on map a very painful, if not impossible task. Old pre 1xxx Garmins have better map detail and I still much prefer 255W for long-distance drives. Especially given that it has better traffic coverage.
That said, I actually like 3490 way more then I expected and I think it’s a great unit. The UI has been re-worked and simplified compared to the chaotic mess that Garmin has been doing for the last 2-3 years. It’s almost as easy to use as old Nuvi’s from 200, 600 and 700 series, but has a much richer functionality. (Ok, the UI might not be immediately straightforward and I had to explain customer service rep how to turn GPS simulation mode on, but once you get used to it, it feels great and gets better with time)
One of the best features of 3490 is the ease of input. You don’t have to suffer through entering the state and the city anymore. Just type the street and the house number and it will search for the address in nearby cities and states, will give you a list of choices , and only if you don’t see the one you’re looking for, you can type the city and state. For someone who has to commute between two states (like NY and NJ) that would be a nice relief. Also, while you type, it offers several matching street names to choose from. The only strange thing is that the matches don’t seem to depend on your prior searches, e.g. if you recently searched for “Broadway” and start typing “B”, you’ll have to type all the way until “Broadw” before “Broadway” shows up. TomTom (I own 2535) would give it right away.
POI search is also simplified (even though it’s hard to imagine that POI search on Garmin can be made simpler). Many weird GUI solutions made in earlier versions are now re-worked into something that gives you a very pleasant experience. POI categories are even more clearly defined, restaurant types have even more sub-categories and you can also search POI by simply typing (or saying) the name. Also what’s important, POI search is very fast, great improvement compared to older versions.
You still have an option to choose “poi near destination”, “poi near active route”, etc, and selecting those options is also much easier than on units released in the last couple of years. “Poi near active route” option was re-worked and it feels like it’s integrated with the new “exit services” feature. If in the past you would get a list of, hotels, with distance, now it would group them by highway name and exit number and for the nearest ones will give the distance to the exit too. I have to note here that I had at least one case where with all the bells and whistles and the new UI, the closest gas station it could offer along the route was 10 miles away and required additional 10 minutes of travel time, while my pre-historic 255W with same map version offered a gas station that was 1 mile away and required a 2-minute detour.
Another item that was re-worked significantly is adding a via point. It now seems to be integrated with trip planner, so when you try to add a new point to your route, you can re-shuffle the order of destinations. The downside of it, as some people complained, is that if you browse a map, it might only show you the first leg of the route (as always, not clear why). This doesn’t seem to be a big issue and if while planning you select “routes” you will be able to see the whole route on map during the planning stage.
Speaking of this, yet another awesome feature of 3490 is that it offers you several routes to your destination and you can pick the one you like. Not just “route A, route B” as it showed up on 3790 and others, but more like Google maps or Navigon. A grain of salt is that when displayed on the map, the colors for alternative routes do not take into account current map scheme, so in some color schemes they are pretty much invisible as their color may be very similar to the colors of highways and…
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