Garmin 880 Reviews

By Topperdog (Texas)

Recently purchased this product for present for fiance. No problems at all and the unit works wonderfully. Not all features have been tried yet, so the review is for basic performance of navigating. The voice recognition has not been tested and the MSN function has not been activated yet.

Pros: Directions are spot on. When taking a different route to the one Garmin calculates, the recalculations are quick and provide excellent directions on the fly. Maps are easy to see and read, and volume is more than enough to hear with music on in background.

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The Garmin 880 is an excellent driving aide. The graphics and audio features are superb. When positioned on a dash board, the display is easily readable in the day as well as the night. The unit’s speech is clear and distinct; and the unit’s response time is quick. It recalculates a new route to a destination when a turn is missed, at a rate that minimizes any deviation to travel time or distance traveled between two points.

By  Frederick Everhart

I’m hooked on Nav systems. I really got it for my RAV4 to replace a Garmin 660 which I liked very much. I have (had) built-in Navs on several cars. The latest is a Lexus 460L. The Lexus is reported to have one of the very best Nav systems. It is very good. But in many respects, the Garmin 880 is better. The voice recognition is vastly superior. There seems to be more POIs. Destinations to remote areas are superior in the 880.

I’m planning a trip to Ohio next week in the Lexus and will be taking the 880 with me and use it in conjunction with the Lexus Nav. For one thing, unlike the Lexus, the 880 will take me to the exact address of an out-of-the-way place. And the other advantage is that the 880 shows the current highway speed limit as well as the current speed of the car–good speed control.

And it’s great to find the cheapest gas, curent weather, stock quotes, the current news, and ‘where am I”, with immediate access to police and hospitals.

Link to this Amazon actual user review.

By Wingflinger “wingflinger” (Ca)

I recently bought an 880 having using a 660 for the last 1.5 years. I have owned 5 Garmins, 3 Lowrances, a Magellen, and have borrowed several of the latest TomTom’s on occassion and I can say that, without a doubt, this is the most complete and easy to use hand held/portable navigator I’ve ever used. Let me explain….

Capability

Garmin packs an amazing amount of capability into this device - Routes, amazing POI search capabilities, a HUGE database of POI’s, extensive customization options, beautiful, easy to read display, decent battery life for use when walking, an array of charging methods (will even charge via USB from your computer) MSN, and many more. No other portable navigator has the breadth of features of the 880. It’s truly the “top of the line”. For this I give it a 5+

Ease of Use

The Nuvi OS in general is quite easy to use. It was the first ever GPS navigator that my wife, who is not into gadgets, could use with absolutely no instructions. In fact, it’s so easy to use she WANTS to use it. Same goes for my father-in-law who is completely technology challenged. He learned how to use it with only about 5 minutes of basic instruction. As easy to use as it is, you still get access to advanced features and the “ease of use” doesn’t get in your way. Once you learn some of the “shortcuts” (like holding down a “back” button to go all the way back to the main menu in one press) it becomes even easier to use. Without a doubt this is the easiest to use of all portable navigators I’ve used (which is quite a few). I give ease of use a “5″.

Read the full review and more at Amazon.

By Henry Dangelo (MEDFIELD, MA USA)

Have been using this for about a week since the day after it came out. Long time Garmin customer, and have loved the Street Pilot series.
Overall this is a great product. The voice recognition is excellent, with almost no errors if the radio is off. I do miss the remote that my street pilot came with, but as I get more used to the VR, I think that will go away.

The MSN features are good, with the best one (in my mind) being the ability to send map points directly to your Nuvi without connecting it to your computer. You do this via Live Search maps, not as good as Google maps, but not bad at all. You can move waypoints from Google maps, but you have to physically connect the unit to the computer.

Given the price I had hoped the GPS unit would find satellites immediately on starting (like the built in unit in my wife’s Honda). However (like the street pilot) it take about 20-30 seconds if the car has been turned off for a while.

Read the full review on Amazon.

By  G. Hubbs

I gave the Garmin Nuvi 880 4 stars because, for me, it really does what I want and need. I have run into a few minor glitches that are NOT the 880’s problem, but a Garmin issue.

First, the pros:

1. It gets me just about anywhere I want to go. Look, I don’t care if I know a shortcut, but the Nuvi 880 doesn’t. I really don’t need it when navigating to places I am familiar with. But, in unfamiliar places it does a real nice job of getting me to my destination.

2. The voice activated system is great. I have used it for around a month now, and I am having few problems with it.

3. The MSN Direct has really been a nice feature. On trips to the Los Angeles area and Las Vegas it “kicked in” automatically to warn us of severe traffic situations ahead, and closed roads. I have used it to find movies and show times, as well as weather reports.

4. I am hard of hearing and use hearing aids, so I like using the connection from the Nuvi to my AUX port on my radio. I can easily hear everything the Nuvi is telling me.

5. I used it in pedestrian mode once. It worked really well. I bought a fanny pack to take it with me when I leave the car. However, it actually fits in the pocket of cargo pants.

6. I use the bluetooth feature all the time. It was absolutely no effort to sync with my phone.

7. On a recent trip I was using the “Where Am I” mode a lot. It has an elevation feature built into it. We were traveling high mountain roads and we used the Nuvi to get the elevation. It was all in fun.

Read the cons and my entire review here on Amazon

By Vito Asaro

I have been using the Nuvi 880 GPS for a couple of weeks now, and it is the best Garmin unit to date, and possibly the portable/handheld/car GPS available at this time. The Garmin Nuvi GPS units are probably the easiest to start using out of the box without reading any manuals.

The new line of Nuvi units have done away with the small flip-up antenna, opting for a internal antenna which is much nicer. This GPS is also VERY thin and can be carried in your jeans pocket (front pocket-without the leather case/protector) if you’re traveling in another country. Because the 880 has done away with the external antenna, it also maintains the same thin dimensions for the length of the backside of the unit, finally losing that small bulge as on the back of the 670 (and other 600-series) Nuvi units.

The speech recognition is about 90% accurate, but this may be due to the higher amount of road noise in my car (and/or the air conditioner fan noise). When it’s quiet, however, the voice recognition is surprisingly accurate.

The ability to have a user-changeable battery is featured on the 880. I can’t tell you how many times I wish I had this feature with our Nuvi 670 on our trip to Italy when we were out all day on foot and the GPS battery became depleted, (though it did last for 5-6 hours). The only thing lacking is that Garmin should sell some sort of external battery charger for the extra batteries rather having to charge them in the unit itself.

Another reviewer mentioned that the Garmin doesn’t have intelligent street recognition (such as with Google) to ask the user if a different spelling for a street/highway was intended when the unit doesn’t return any results with the spelling it was given. This is not true, and perhaps that reviewer should have another read of the documentation to understand this. If you provide a partial text street or highway name to the Garmin it will return a list of possible matches. The Nuvi 880 works slightly different than previous Nuvi models in that the earlier models would provide an “active lookup”, listing the possible matches as soon as the user had typed enough characters to determine a match. The 880, however, allows the user to provide (enter) the partial or full street/intersection AND THEN it will display a list of possible matches. This works a little more efficiently than the previous models because it allows the system to do a single fast search, rather than searching after each letter, and it allows the user to correct any typing mistakes before searching on them.

Another nice feature of the Garmin unit is that the virtual keyboard for spelling can be QWERTY style now.

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