We just got back from a mini road trip to demo our newest car gadget: the Garmin Street Pilot c330. I’ve been checking out these GPS navigation systems for awhile and waiting for the right moment to jump in. One of the Wal-mart Black Friday deals was the Garmin c330 which Consumer Reports rated highly. $128? Are you kidding? I’m there.

Official website product page for Garmin Street Pilot c330
Buy Garmin StreetPilot c330 at Amazon (affiliate)

The c330 comes in one of those knuckle bleeding clam shell cases. Take your favorite pocket knife or razor blade to the case and unveil the contents: c330 which fits in the palm of your hand, suction cup mount and circular dash sticky mount, CD and USB cord.

Attaching the Garmin c330 to the suction cup windshield mount is as easy as pressing it into the grooves and snapping it gently into place. You don’t even need to even plug it into the USB to charge the three hour internal battery.

I wet the back of the suction cup, unhinged the clasp and then stuck it on the front windshield beneath the rearview mirror of our 2007 PT Cruiser. The winshield mount swivels so when you aren’t using the device you can push it up near the mirror and give yourself more line of sight. There is a small plugin on the device for the cigarette adapter which powers the c330.

Note: the states of California and Minnesota prohibit the use of anything that attaches to your windshield. You’ll need to use the enclosed circular dash mount for those cases. Pity really, as the c330 isn’t intrusive (see picture above of limited line of sight interference).

During our trip, we decided to move the unit down further so it had a better view of the skies. We had some issues with locating satellites with it closer to the rear-view mirror.

On first power-up the c330 will communicate with the satellite and triangulate your position. Now big brother knows where you are at (just kidding). This process takes a couple minutes. Meanwhile you can thumb through one of the smallest instruction manuals I’ve received with any gadget. It’s like a half dozen pages with color pictures. The Garmin Street Pilot c330 ranks among one of the easiest to setup gadgets I’ve ever used.

After the initial setup the User Interface gives you two choice: Where to? and View Map.

This simplistic UI is surprisingly effective. Both my wife and I found it very easy to tell the Garmin c330 where we wanted to go.

In the above picture four key items are marked in red:

1. The arrival time to your destination. This will be explained in more detail shortly.
2. Menu button will return you to the “Where now?” screen. You can also access the settings (marked with a wrench). These items are disabled in safe mode while driving. You can disable safe mode if a passenger is going to program new or modify existing destinations. If you choose a new destination along the route to another one, the c330 will ask you if you want to travel to the secondary location along the way to your existing destination. This is useful if you are hungry and need to veer a bit off track in order to get to a nearby restaurant.
3. This is your vehicle. Note that your destination is shown in red. As long as you keep the car in the red, you’re traveling the right direction. Funny that they didn’t use green. Your destination is marked with a checkered flag.
4. On the right bottom corner is how many miles or feet until your next turn or action point. We learned that sometimes the c330 would tell us to “stay right” or “stay left” when the text actually says to turn. A little confusing when you look at the screen but if you follow the road, you’re good to go.

One of the neat functions is being able to choose the “near” option which will tell you where points of interest are like shopping malls, gas stations, restaurants and more. When you find a spot you want to go to, like we did with a nearby Godfather’s Pizza you just touch with your finger and choose “Go.”

Perhaps the biggest issue with these devices is the accuracy of the maps and satellite connection. If the maps are too outdated then it will show you places nearby that don’t exist at all. Godfather’s Pizza in Lacey is now a Round Table, for example. We also found a couple other places on our brief beach trip that didn’t exist.

As for the satellite connection, we experienced a total meltdown with the Garmin c330 while driving through Portland, Oregon. It kept losing the signal and when it found a signal it would be off on streets nearby that we weren’t on. I decided to call Garmin support today to see what they recommended about dealing with outdated maps and inferior satellite connectivity through a major city in the United States. If we lived in and/or regularly navigated through Portland there’s no way I’d want to use this device. I learned that there is a free firmware upgrade on the website which specifically deals with this issue.

Another useful feature is bright, very readable text that shows detailed data about your trip such as (pictured above):

- how long it will take to get there. The estimated arrival time is shown in the lower left corner. This gives you the ability to estimate how many miles away you are. The arrival time and miles will adjust as you move closer to your destination.
- miles per hour traveled both current and overall average. There is also a rather useles max speed counter. We found this number getting out of sync frequently showing numbers like 286mph. In a PT Cruiser? Yeah, right. Even got a number 986mph once, I’d like to see the speeding ticket for that one!
- trip counter (”Total time”). Contains stats for how far traveled, how much time. Some vehicles have these features as part of the cruise control package and this would be a duplicate feature but for those vehicles without, it’s handy.
- stop time (”Stopped”). How much time are you spending stopped at traffic lights?

Both the trip settings (”Reset Trip”) and max settings (”Reset Max”) can be reset with a touch to the buttons along the bottom.

Somewhat quirky search
You can also enter in street addresses and search by names, but the search is greatly dependent on the map database. Again, everything goes back to the map database. We tried finding the Fry’s in our area. We tried misspelling (below) and spelling it correctly but the c330 could not locate the Fry’s in Renton.

Fortunately, we could enter in the exact address and have the c330 help us navigate there that way.

The importance of current maps
Business open and close, it’s very difficult for the maps to stay completely current, but after further more extensive testing I was disappointed that the c330 comes with crippled maps. The reason the c330 is being sold so cheaply is because the maps are outdated and there isn’t enough space internally on the units to hold the entire US and Canada. Since we travel to Canada a few times a year, this isn’t a good unit for us.

Surprisingly, the customer support rep at Garmin was very helpful in recommending the following other Garmin units which would fit our needs better:

Street Pilot c340 - this is the newer model in the 300 series and if it doesn’t come with the current 2008 maps, Garmin will automatically send you the new maps for free ($70 USD for c330 owners). This also adds the feature of voice prompts for the street name: e.g “turn right on main street in 0.2 miles” versus the c330 version of: “turn right in 0.2 miles.” Also the c340 comes with a feature that allows viewing the maps on your computer. This way you can map out destinations from your computer.
nuVee 250 (no voice streets) - comes with enough space to hold full US and Canada maps but doesn’t have the voice prompts
nuVee 260 (voice street prompts = yes) - a little more expensive than the 250.

And finally a more fancy and expensive version was offered: the nuvee 350 (voice street yes, MP3 and picture storage). Not sure we need to go this far as we already have an iPod and Zune with plenty of storage for music and pictures, but it’s nice to know what versions come with the 2008 maps. It’s too bad Wal-mart didn’t do anything to educate people on Black Friday that the c330 deal came with a big *asterisk:

*1. maps are outdated and it cost $70 to update them
*2. unit doesn’t have the capacity to hold full maps for US and Canada. Something important that people who live near the border like we do will probably want to know.

Bad Wal-mart, bad. I suppose we should have expected it was too good a deal to be true.

Points of Interest
One last thing to mention that makes these devices cool are programmable points of interest (POI). You can download POI from various sites on the web to an SD card up to 2GB in size and then be able to access them from all the Garmin GPS devices. I didn’t check into how easy this is to do, formats and the like, but it sounds like a great way to make your GPS even more useful.

After using the c330 the last few days, and especially because I love playing around with new gadgets, I’m not sure how or why I haven’t bought and used one of these devices sooner.

Summary and Grade
If you live in the midwest or don’t travel to Canada, the c330 could be an OK first GPS device at the price. I was really stoked about the device until realizing the number of limitations. Now I have buyer’s remorse. I was on hold calling Garmin support for almost 20 minutes before the rep came to the line (bad), but found the friendly service representative helpful and knowledgeable.

I love how easy it is to read the c330 screen. It will automatically switch into night mode display which is also easy to read in the evening. The touch screen sensitivity was just right although my fingers did press the wrong keys a few times. Overall, not something that would turn me off to the interface which I think is one of the strengths of the device.

It’s rare when a customer support person encourages you to take something back to the store because the device isn’t a good fit for your individual situation. Additionally she knew the answers to my other questions and helped me understand what other units they sold would be a better fit. I’ll end up spending more, but then if we bought the $70 maps that we couldn’t even load fully anyway, we’d be at $200 anyway. I’m thinking for $200 we should be able to find the c340. Amazon shows the c340 for almost $100 more than we paid for the c330.

At the price and if you don’t mind the limitations the c330 could provide a whole new travel dimension. I’m going to take it back to Wal-mart and see if I can get the c340 instead. Grade: C+

Did this post make you go hmm?

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