I've had the great pleasure to try out the sleek, portable nüvi 350 from Garmin for a while now. It takes GPS into a wider world than just GPS navigation, offering an all-in-one traveler’s reference and digital entertainment system . It's really a pocket-sized personal travel assistant, and it's rechargeable lithium-ion battery makes it convenient for navigation by car or foot.

The nüvi 350 comes ready to go right out of the box with preloaded City Navigator NT street maps, including a robust points of interest database with hotels, restaurants, gas stations and ATMs for instance.

Destinations can be plotted with 2-D or 3-D maps and turn-by-turn voice directions (or just leave the voice off if you've got your own onboard human navigator).

In addition, the nüvi 350 accepts custom points of interest, such as school zones and safety cameras, and lets you set proximity alerts to warn you of them.

Any GPS really becomes invaluable with traffic alerts, and nüvi offers an optional FM TMC traffic receiver and traffic services. With these, once you're notified of accidents or road construction ahead on your route, you can simply touch the screen to view traffic details or recalculate your route to avoid traffic. Now you're talking!

Beyond Navigation

But navigation is just the beginning because the nüvi 350 adds such entertainment and travel tools as an MP3 player, audio book player (subscription required), JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter and calculator.

It also comes with Garmin Lock, an anti-theft feature, and is compatible with Garmins' free Garmin Garage where you can download custom vehicles that show your location on the map. Optional plug-in SD cards let you add additional features to enhance your travel experience, such as language translation and detailed travel guides.

MSRP:$350.67

www.garmin.com