BIOS: Technology Means Business

Gramin’s brand-new nüvi 350 (£499/$899) is a very versatile travel assistant that’s approximately the size of a deck of playing cards.

The nüvi 350 is a portable GPS navigator, traveller’s reference, and digital entertainment system. Combined with detailed maps, the nüvi provides automatic routing, turn-by-turn voice directions, and finger-touchscreen control, which should make it easy to find your way anywhere.

The nüvi also offers a travel kit of useful travel tools to help keep any journey fun: MP3 player, audio book player from Audible.com, JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, and calculator. In addition, optional software packages such as the Language Guide and Travel Guide (sold separately on SD Data cards) can be added for language and content support.

You can access an optional Garmin Language Guide, with data provided by Oxford University Press. This software suite contains a multilingual word bank, phrase bank, and five bilingual dictionaries.

The multilingual word bank and phrase bank supports nine languages and dialects, including American English, British English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, European Spanish, and Latin American Spanish.

The Language Guide also lets you look up and translate more than 17000 words or 20000 phrases per language. Through the unit’s text-to-speech interface, you can get a spoken pronunciation of each entry in the word bank - along with gender and part of speech information.

The new Garmin Travel Guide is loaded with information provided by Marco Polo. These guides put in-depth travel information - such as reviews and recommendations for restaurants, tourist attractions, and more - at your fingertips.

Travelers can use the nüvi to navigate to an address or search points of interest (POIs) - places like hotels, restaurants, shopping, and tourist attractions. The nüvi automatically calculates the fastest route and provides voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions along the way.

Thanks to the nüvi’s text-to-speech functionality, the unit audibly announces the name of upcoming streets - letting drivers keep their eyes on the road while navigating through busy traffic and tricky roadways. If users stray off course, the nüvi automatically calculates the quickest way to get back on track.

The nüvi 350 is compatible with the GTM 10 FM TMC traffic receiver, which allows you to avoid traffic tie-ups by simply pushing a button that will calculate a new route. The nüvi 350 also comes with an A/C charger and approximately 700MBs of internal memory for storage of supplemental maps, MP3s, and audio books (available from Audible.com).

The European version contains full European mapping right off the shelf. North American versions include pre-loaded City Navigator NT maps of the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

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