I was in the market for a second GPS unit. I was going to buy the same Navman usin that I already have. Howver I am enperienced GPS user now and I know what feature were lacking in my old unit. A couple of features I was looking for include

text to speech
Ability to avoid highways
Ability to enter my own route if I know a certain road has a ton of lights or contruction
Live traffic
A detour feature

Based on the recommendations of some friends I was looking at the Garmin 750 & 760 gps units, After a bit of research I discovered that somting about the Nuvi line. The Avoidances menu can be used as a round-about way of forcing the nuvi 760 to exclude highways. Unfortunately there’s no way to avoid, or exclude, specific roads or highways – a feature sorely missing from Garmin’s entire nuvi product line.

I then turned my eye to the Magellan 4250 which I saw at buy.com for $119 refurbished. The live traffic feature has a free trial for 3 month ans then is $60/year. That’s not too bad.

Most GPS system make you choose avoidance options (avoid highways, avoid tolls etc..) as part of the main menu system and it applies to all routes you enter. The 4250 et’s you choose a route method while entering an address. After you can further tweak the chosen path by browsing the maneuver list and excluding any roads you want to specifically avoid. You can also use the methos for detours bu there is also a dedicated detour option.

It looks easy to enter multiple stops (way points) if you want to plan a trip to different points on the same trip.

This is a lot of GPS for only $119.

In an earlier post I compared the C320, C330 and C340 GPS units.

At the time the prices were
C320 – $275
C330 – $320
C340 – $387

The current prices are
At the time the prices were
C320 – $275
C330 – $261
C340 – $329

It looks like have been significant price drops on the C330 and C340 but not the C320. I’m not sure why anyone would even consider the C320 at these price points.

In the US there are three choices in the Garmin C3XX series. The Garmin C320, C330 and C340. It’s a little confusing to decide which one to buy.

I can say pretty confidently to cross the C330 off your list.

The main features that are different on these three units are:
- A built in hard drive to store maps
- Unit Speaks Street Names and POI Names

So here’s how I see it. The only difference between the Garmin C320 and C330 is that you will need to upload maps from your computer to the SD card on the C320. You can buy a 1GB SD card for about $20 which will hold the entire US. That brings the total price of the C320 to $295. Which is $25 cheaper than the C330.

Now that we eliminated the C330 the choice remains of it’s worth $100 to have the C340 say “Turn Left Onto High Street” as opposed to “Turn left in 50 feet”. In very informal surveys friends have said they prefer the unit that would say the street names. Some feel it’s a waste of money.

Personally I live the idea of the unit that speaks the street names. It would mean I could keep my eyes on the road and have some feedback that I took the correct turn if the roads were close to each other.

According to CBS News a company is ready to launch footware with embeddded GPS technology. The inventor is Isaac Daniel.

I think this is a pretty cool use of GPS especially for concerned parents or hikers. The shoes start at about $350. This is a nice step up from the Digital Angel RFID chips. It looks similar to the Global Pet Finder technology only for sneakers. Cool.