8. Finding a Place by Spelling The Name

9. Telling the nuvi Where to Search

Figure 48: Setting the search location

Suppose you want to find a restaurant near your destination instead of your current location? Tapping on the Near... button brings up the Search Near menu shown below:

Figure 49: Setting the Search Region

After tapping on the Search Near button on the "Where To" page, you can specify whether the nuvi should search near your current location, a specified city, along your current route, or near your final destination.

Some other GPS units have this feature, but the Garmin makes it easy and simple, and they've implemented it in an intuitive way.

10. Setting the Home Address

The Home address is a special address that is saved in the Favorites area (aka the address book). The Home address has a button on the Where To menu to make it easy/fast to tell the nuvi to take you home.

Figure 50: Setting the Home Address

The first time you tap on the Home button, the nuvi asks if you want to specify the Home address.

11. Travel Kit

Figure 51: Travel Kit

The Travel Kit is accessed from the main menu by tapping on "Travel Kit".

Figure 52: Features located in the Travel Kit

The "Travel Kit" is how you access the following nuvi features:

• Listening to MP3s
• Playing Audible Books
• Viewing Photos
• Using the World Clock
• Converting Currency
• Converting Measurements
• Using the Calculator

12. Playing MP3's

Figure 53: Accessing the MP3 Player

The MP3 player can be access either by tapping on MP3 Player from the Travel Kit menu, or you jump directly to the MP3 player by tapping on the music note icon from the map view, as shown above in figure 51.

In order to really make use of the built-in MP3 player, you'll want to get an SD memory card. In my testing, I found 512MB large enough to hold about 100 songs. A decent 512MB SD card can be had for around $16.

I have to admit it: I though I wouldn't care about the MP3 player, as I normally don't think of using the GPS to play music. However, the combination of the MP3 player and the integrated wireless FM transmitter really made a believer out of me. The wireless FM transmitter broadcasts the audio from the nuvi to your car's stereo, making the music (and navigation prompts) play over your car's speaker system. Sure, you could do the same thing with an iPod and a separate FM transmitter, but the key here is EASE OF USE. Having everything integrated really makes the whole thing viable. I found myself actually using the MP3 player all the time, now that it's so easy to use and plays over my car's speaker system.

If you're navigating to a destination, and playing music at the same time, the nuvi will politely pause the music, announce the next maneuver, and resume playing the song. See what I mean about the benefit of integration?

Figure 54: MP3 Player

The interface for the MP3 is intuitive: tapping the speaker icon brings up the volume control, tapping rewind or fast-forward backs up to the previous song or jumps to the next song, tapping and holding the same buttons rewinds or fast-forwards within the song. The two icons on the right side of the screen are the repeat and shuffle icons.

Tapping on the Source button allows you to toggle between the nuvi's internal memory, and an SD memory card (if present). Tapping on the Browse button allows you to search your MP3 collection.

Figure 55: Browsing the MP3 collection

The nuvi's MP3 player allows you to search your collection of songs by album, artist, genre, or search the entire collection for a particular song/artist. The nuvi reads this information from the ID3 tag, so you'll need your MP3's to be correctly tagged in order to use the browse function effectively.

One things that would be nice is the ability to create playlists on the nuvi directly. You can play a given album, or stay within a genre, but it would be nice if you could create a custom playlist and save it.