Garmin 880 is One of the Best GPS Units Available Today!
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.
