Garmin nüvi 3490LMT 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime
Garmin nüvi 3490LMT 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Maps and Traffic
- Less than 9mm thick
- Make hands-free calls and texts
- Voice activated navigation
- Lifetime Map and TrafficUpdates
- Lane assist with photoReal junction view
Thanks to Garmin Guidance 3.0, FREE lifetime traffic¹ and map² updates, advanced lane guidance and much more, nüvi 3490LMT provides the most comprehensive navigation capabilities available. And at just 9 mm, it’s also our thinnest navigator yet. Navigate by Touch or by Voice With its innovative speech recognition, you can control nüvi 3490LMT with your voice — allowing you to keep both hands on the wheel. Simply wake up nüvi with a customizable voice command and begin speaking menu options that are clearly displayed on the screen. When you’re stopped, you can still control the nüvi using its 4.3-inch (10.92-cm) glass touchscreen.
Garmin Guidance 3.0 allows you to quickly look up addresses and services and be gu
List Price: $ 399.99
Price: $ 370.00
GPS with Customer Reviews
Michael
December 24, 2011Almost didn’t get this great unit… but so glad I did,
I presently have the Nuvi 3790 and almost didn’t go for this new unit. I am now glad I did. I have a number of trips all over in the next few weeks and was anxious to get this unit before they began. Had it pre-ordered on Amazon, they sent me a note that it was shipping and then it didn’t and got delayed, so I got it elsewhere.
Registering the unit was a breeze. No problem for my Garmin communicator to recognize the unit and ask me if I wanted to register it. Went smoothly. I also loaded safety camera poi’s from a third party and that went well too. I use web-updater usually as I can control what gets updated. I had an issue with the 3790 and it had to be replaced (with a refurbished unit). I would NOT load their map updater. I want to be in control of what gets updated. Just my two cents worth of experience.
A word of caution, you have to spend some time drilling down all the menu options, since you have a lot of control over what you want displayed on the screen. The three default buttons seemed fine at first, but I changed one of them … left the traffic and mute button and changed the stop route button to where to. It seemed to me easier to hit the button to choose a via point than hit a button twice. My personal preference. You can eliminate all the shortcut buttons if you want. I like the idea of them on the screen though.
Speaking of via points, I like how this unit handles them. You can add a lot of them on the way. And you can reorder them as to how you get to them and in what order. Not sure if it optimizes the routing for them, but I suspect it doesn’t. I like this approach and control.
I also love the idea of having your favorite poi’s or saved destinations available as shortcuts on the where to menu. Reminds me of Magellan — I have had a few of them in the past — but like Garmin better.
I also like being able to select what poi’s you would like to see pop up on the screen as you travel. Reminds me of my Navigons years ago. Really enjoyed seeing for instance a McDonald’s near my travels and just driving in its direction when I had a Navigon 7100 and 7200.
I was concerned that the new user interface was taking away things from me. I love info and the ability to control it. And while the dashboards need some work I found the default one seems to work for me at this point the best. I expect Garmin will update these along the way. I have pretty much what info I had before available to me and even more.
When you calculate a route you are often given a number of options. This happens on the 3790 as well, but it is easier to use on the 3490. Again it reminds me of Navigon. I was sad to see them leave the US market, but Garmin has caught up with their great ideas.
On the first leg of my trip I had the 3790 and 3490 set up side by side. The 3490 got going faster than the 3790. Both had been turned on and had acquired signals the day before, so it was an equal comparison when I pushed both on buttons at the same time. I was well on my way with the 3490 when the 3790 kicked in.
I also noticed more lane assist screens on the 3490 than the 3790. I had read that street info wasn’t as prevalent as the 3790, but I selected the more detail option and haven’t really noticed much difference.
I have found lane assist to be invaluable. I also like how junction views look with photo real pictures and now sharing the screen and staying on the screen until you get there. Much better approach than a few seconds for a pop up covering the whole screen in the past.
Arrival times always vary. It’s hard for any GPS to take into account traffic lights and construction on regular streets. UPS years ago programmed their computers to eliminate left turns as much as possible to save gas and time. They save lots and lots of money. It makes sense if you think about it.
Also, this is the first Garmin unit I have owned that does not say, “recalculating” when a route is being recalculated. It got to be annoying at times. This unit just recalculates with no notice. I also found the voice command feature to be a bit more responsive and accurate than the 3790.
I suspect that one reason the 3400 and 3700 series are not live like the 1695 is its size. No room for the receiver. I did enjoy the live feature and Google search on the 1695 I had, but it’s a trade off for the great size.
This is a very compact unit. It’s actually the 3790 unit size, but a fraction heavier, just a fraction. I love this size because I carry it in my shirt pocket when out of the car. Garmin has a perfect case just designed for the 3400 and 3700 series. I would urge you to get it. It’s available on Amazon for a bit cheaper than the retail price…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|HK "GK"
December 24, 2011best 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…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|