Garmin nüvi 760 Portable GPS Automobile Navigator

Product Description

Loaded and wide, n?vi 760 has it all - advanced navigation features, a widescreen display, preloaded maps, an FM transmitter, hands-free calling, traffic alerts and more. Like the rest of the wide n?vi 700-series, its premium navigation capabilities, like route planning and a handy locator, give you peace of mind on the go. With n?vi 760's widescreen display, you'll always get the big picture. View map detail, driving directions, photos and more in bright, brilliant color. Its sunlight-readable, 4.3-inch display is easy to read - from any direction.n?vi 760 comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded City Navigator NT street maps and millions of points of interest (POIs) such as hotels, restaurants, fuel stations, ATMs and more. Simply touch the color screen to enter a destination, and n?vi takes you there with 2D or 3D maps and turn-by-turn voice directions. It even announces the name of exits and streets so you never have to take your eyes off the road. In addition, n?vi 760 accepts custom points of interest, such as school zones and safety cameras and lets you set proximity alerts to warn you of upcoming POIs. The European version even includes a preloaded safety camera database containing locations of cameras for parts of Europe.

Product Details

• Color: Gray
• Brand: Garmin
• Model: Nuvi 760
• Dimensions: 2.80" h x .80" w x 4.80" l, 3.00 pounds
• Native resolution: 480 x 272

Features

• Sleek Ultra Slim Design; Bright 4.3 Inch Diagonal Color Touchscreen Display;
• Multi-destination routing; "Where Am I?" and "Where's My Car?"
• Integrated FM Wireless Transmitter Sends Audio Through Vehicle Stereo
• GTM 20 FM TMC Traffic Receiver and 3-Month Free Traffic Data Subscription
• Bluetooth for Hands-Free calling

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Product Description -- January 8, 2008
Garmin's nüvi 700 series brings two exciting new features -- multi-destination routing and, "Where am I?/Where's my car?" -- to its popular pocket-sized GPS navigator lineup. As with all nüvis, you get Garmin reliability, the fast satellite lock of an integrated high-sensitivity receiver, a slim, pocket-sized design with a gorgeous display, an easy, intuitive interface, and detailed NAVTEQ maps for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico with more than 6 million name-searchable points of interest. All of the 700-series navigators also feature a rich array of features including spoken directions in real street names, MP3 player and photo viewer, and an FM transmitter that will play voice prompts, MP3s, audio books, and more, directly through your vehicle's stereo system. The nüvi 760 and 770 add integrated traffic receivers and Bluetooth capability for hands-free calling. The nüvi 770 adds maps for Europe. The nüvi 780 adds enhanced MSN direct content capability..

Which nüvi is Best for You?: Click here to see a quick, simple comparison of features for all Garmin nuvi GPS navigators

Garmin's nüvis pack top of the line features into a slim form factor.

Wider screen lets you see more of what's around. Compare these actual size views of a 3-inch (diagonal) screen and a 4.3-inch diagonal widescreen

New Features -- Where Am I? Where's My Car?
The nüvi 700 series is the first to answer two common questions: "Where am I?" and "Where's my car?"

At any time, with a single tap of the screen, drivers can display their exact latitude and longitude coordinates, the nearest address and intersection, and the closest hospitals, police stations and gas stations. And to help drivers find their car in an unfamiliar spot or vast parking lot, all nüvi 700s automatically mark the position in which they were last removed from the mount.

New Features -- Multi-Destination Routing
This lets you enter several spots into the device (day care - supermarket-cleaners - office - day care, for example) and it will plot the fastest route. And once you've found the best router, the "Route Planning" feature lets you save up to 10 different routes, Garmin touts the feature for providing, "the most efficient route for errands, deliveries and sales calls." The feature also makes this an instant essential accessory for anyone who shops garage sales (you know what we're talking about).

A trip log provides an electronic bread crumb trail of up to 10,000 points, so you can see where you've been on the map.

See Better, See More
The super-bright, 4.3-inch (diagonal) touchscreen display gives is anti-glare for ease of viewing during the day and automatically changes its color profile for easy viewing at night or in dim light. It offers 2d or 3D perspective views.

The widescreen format gives you 70% more actual screen area than a 3.5-inch screen. Primarily this translates into a better view of the area through which you are driving. This is especially useful in showing you what parks, restaurants, ATM, gas stations, etc. are nearby, or in letting you know whether a detour is a good idea. Also, the device itself is larger, meaning controls on the screen are more widely spaced and somewhat easier to push.

First Rate Map Data
All nüvi 700s come preloaded with highly detailed City Navigator NT road maps for the entire United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. This map database features nearly six million points of interest (POIs), including hotels, restaurants, gas stations, ATMs, and attractions. Garmin gets its map data from NAVTEQ, a world leader in premium-quality mapping.

Important note about map updates: Due to our high volume of sales, almost every Garmin portable GPS navigator sold by Amazon.com will come with the most recent map version. If you ever do need a map update, you can purchase one from Amazon.com at our Garmin Store.

Hands-Free Calling
In more and more places, it is becoming illegal to use cell phones while driving without a hands-free kit. WIth Bluetooth capability, microphone and speaker, you can match your nüvi to any bluetooth-capable phone to make hands-free mobile phone calls. Simply dial the phone number with the nüvi's touch screen keypad to make a call on a compatible phone. To answer an incoming call, just tap the screen and speak into the built-in microphone. Making and taking calls on the road has never been easier, or safer. In addition, Garmin makes it a breeze to look-up and dial numbers from your personalized phone book or even tap into your cell phone's call history log.

Integrated FM Traffic Receiver

Steer clear of traffic with an integrated FM traffic receiver designed to receive alerts from TMC Clear Channel about traffic tie-ups and road construction that might lie ahead on your route. All you have to do is simply touch the screen to view traffic details and you'll be ready to detour around any problem area. And if you end up missing a turn, or you're forced into a detour that is not relayed through the traffic receiver, the nüvi's sophisticated automatic routing will get you back on track in no time. In most areas, TMC Clear Channel traffic broadcasts are continuous — there's no waiting for scheduled traffic news updates or random alerts. Because traffic broadcasts are received via a "silent" FM data channel, you can still listen to music or news programming on your car radio without interference from incoming FM traffic data transmissions. A 3-month subscription to TMC Clear Channel's Total Traffic Network is included with purchase of this device. For more information on subscription fees, coverage in individual cities, and traffic data networks in the United Kingdom and Europe, check the Garmin website.

Garmin Lock
Garmin's patent pending theft prevention system that disables the unit from performing any functions until the user types in a specific 4-digit PIN or takes the unit to a predetermined secure location

Easy To Use Interface
Garmin's interface is a key to their success and one of the things that makes their devices such a pleasure to use. Simple controls and sub-screens make it easy to enter or search for destinations and get data about your trip.

Beyond Navigation

Browse your stored pictures with an easy-to-use JPEG viewer.

A handy MP3 player lets you play songs stored on SD memory cards.

nüvi 250W accepts custom points of interest (POIs). View larger.

Navigation is just the beginning. All nüvi 700s feature travel tools including JPEG picture viewer, MP3 player, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, calculator and more.

They are also compatible with optional content plug-ins available via SD card, such as the Garmin Travel Guides and Garmin SaversGuide provide detailed data for attractions and information on nearby merchants offering discounts, so you can customize your nüvi for all your travel needs.

Garmin has also added the ability for customers to add custom points of interest (POI's) from third parties such as school zones and safety cameras.

Trick Your GPS Ride

Custom vehicle icons let you ride in style, at least inside your GPS. See more icon options

All nüvis support configurable vehicle icons. These fun, customized car-shaped icons come in a variety of colors to add a personal touch to your vehicle's position on the map.

What's in the Box
nüvi 760, Preloaded City Navigator NT for North America, FM traffic receiver with vehicle power cable, 3-month subscription to TMC real-time traffic services, Vehicle suction cup mount, USB cable, Dashboard disc, Quick start manual

Notes

• Optional software for language translation, detailed travel guides, and savings programs allow you to customize your nüvi to fit your travel needs
• The FM transmitter feature is only available in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
• This nüvi comes with a free, three-month trial for MSN Direct services.
  
• Like most USB Mass Storage Devices, the nüvi is not compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me.

Better than the nuvi 660
I own both the Nuvi 660 and the 760, I'm writing this review for people having trouble deciding between the two as the price difference between the two products at the time of this review is about 100 dollars. I'm not going to focus on the feature differences, as that information can be easily obtained from specifications and online reviews. The 660 was a fine product back in 2005-2006, but the new 760 outdoes the 660 in practically everything, but there are some key usability fixes that make the 760 a better buy for the frequent user.

1. 760 has much better fonts for street names than the 660. This may seem like a trivial update to some, but the 760's fonts greatly improve visibility. The 660 uses all capitalized text for street names on the map, and the font is incredibly cartoonish and unaligned, something like the scribbling Comic Sans font on the PC. The 760 uses your standard Verdana-like font with street names in capitalized and lowercase letters. The fonts on the 760 are smaller, cleaner and surprisingly much easier to read while driving. The maps end up looking professional, and not some cartoony children's video game.

2. 760 has better rendering in 3D map mode than the 660. In the 660 when you are zoomed in under 3D map mode, the roads close to your car are displayed incredibly large, so large that they run into other roads, making the zoom function essentially kind of useless for dense roads. The 760 does not oversize your roads just because you zoomed in to view smaller roads in detail. This fix is very nice for those who drive in places with dense roadways, like New York City.

3. No antenna on the 760 makes hooking up your Nuvi to the cradle one step easier. On the 660 you need to flip up the antenna before attaching the cradle. For people who park their cars on the street overnight, removing the GPS from the cradle for storage in the console or glove compartment is a must, and it's a lot easier hooking up the 760 to the cradle than the 660. It's hard to aim the 660 to its cradle in the dark as you have to align both the bottom edge and the charge port under the antenna. In the 760, the charge port is directly on the bottom of the unit; you can attach it to the cradle with one hand in the dark easily on the 760.

4. It takes the 660 a good 45 seconds on average (sometimes longer than 2 minutes) after boot up to locate the satellite on a cold start. If you have firmware 2.6 installed on the 760, the satellite acquisition time after boot up is between 10-20 seconds. After the firmware update, my 760 also holds a stronger lock to the satellites than my 660, I can get satellite lock inside my house with the 760, whereas I can't get a lock with my 660 (adjusting the antenna does very little).

5. The ability to set multiple ad hoc viapoints on the 760 means it's a lot easier creating alternate routes (very handy to avoid a specific interstate or a high traffic road). Whereas the 660 gives you just one viapoint.

Highly Recommended,
This unit is replacing a nuvi 360, which is going to my sister. The nuvi 760 is still a bit hard to find. I found one in stock at a local SoCal retailer on 28-Oct.

Overall, I like the new compact form factor. There have been concerns expressed in various forums on the sensitivity of the internal antenna. So far, it seems to be sensitive enough. Side by side, signal strength and accuracy of the 760 are maginally better than my old 360 with the pop-up antenna. I'm getting 21 foot accuracy inside an office, a few feet from East facing windows. Attaching my external antenna to the MCX connector gives 9 Foot accuracy with 10 satellites at full signal strength.

The wide screen display is much brighter than the 360, readable in direct sunlight. The interface refinements are generally improvements, cleaner, more logical. I like having a choice of a QWERTY keyboard, better editing with retained history for the search field. Based on limited testing, the routing engine seems to perform identically to the 360, which was excellent. I've noticed a few updates to reflect newer roads in the 2008 maps. POIs are much improved in the San Diego area.

"Where am I?" works well and is quite useful displaying nearest address, major intersection, nearby hospitals, police and gas stations. "Where did I leave my car" is a bit clunky since you have to go into setup and change the Navigation to "off road" and then select "Last Location" from Favorites.

I've found two bugs so far in the initial firmware:

1) Start guidance with GPS active on a stored route with a distant starting point, decline "Navigate to Starting Point", nuvi will crash and delete the route.

2) Bluetooth dialing of "Home" phone number is truncated when using "Call Home" from the Phone screen. Dialing the same number from the "Home" entry in Favorites works.

Bluetooth paired easily with my Motorola E815 phone. Call history and phone book are loaded into the nuvi automatically. The sound from the built-in speaker is just OK. You may want to run it through your car speakers using the FM transmitter or Aux jack. If you use the phone a lot, buy the optional microphone and clip it to your visor... people will hear you better.

Garmin do not provide an AC charger in the box. They will sell you one. Using a generic USB charger (I used on from a Blackberry) places the nuvi in Data Mode. It charges just fine, but you can't use it while it is charging.

Still no selective route avoidance. The 2008 maps actually have a road near me that is not yet open. The nuvi always wants to take it to get to the freeway.

Haven't tested the traffic functionality yet. The nuvi comes with a 3-month subscription, then it's $60/yr.

The FM transmitter is less than useful with the crowded spectrum in SoCal. Hard to find an open channel, need to change it periodically. Often get a bit of static. I'm using the Aux input on my car stereo instead.

All in all, a great evolution of the nuvi line. I'm sure the firmware glitches will get worked out over time. If you are in the market at this price range and can find one, buy it.

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