Weddings bring us together
Ah, weddings. Love in the air, food in abundance, good music, and old friends. It's easy to love weddings. It's not so easy to find your way cross-country to a wedding. Unless of course you have a helper by the name of Garmin. Full name: Garmin StreetPilot c330 portable car navigation system. But I'll just call "him" the c330 today. "He" was, essentially, my date to my good friend's wedding.
 Meet the Garmin c330. Small, light, bright, and fun to use. |
A short while ago, I had to go down to Charleston, S.C. to attend the wedding of my long-time friend, Larissa, who is the only person I've kept in touch with from my high school. Apparently, I'm the only person she's kept in touch with, too, so I was considered a pretty "special" guest. In other words, I had to be there. After a small airline snafu, it looked as though I would be driving the eight hours down to South Carolina. I'd never been to Charleston, and hadn't attempted a road trip that long by myself for many a year. The last two times I'd tried getting someplace new, I'd used a printout from an online route-maker. One time I ran into construction (and a dizzying detour); the other time, the directions were just completely unclear. Both times I got lost, and the fear, frustration, and anxiety that goes along with getting lost I haven't forgotten.
This time, I wasn't taking any chances. I had to find my way to the hotel, then to the rehearsal dinner, to the shopping district, the church, the reception, and a friend's house just outside of town — not to mention all the stops along the way. That's a lot of map printouts, and more route calculation mistakes than I care to think about. Enter the c330.
Navigation in the blink of an eye
I picked up the c330 from one of the product buyers here at Crutchfield who had been doing some preliminary test-drives with it. He first gave me the unit and its mounting hardware. The c330 comes with a very sturdy suction-cup windshield bracket that quickly attaches to your windshield. It makes viewing, reaching, and using the unit very easy from the driver's seat. Then he started rummaging for the manual. But by the time he found it a minute later, I'd already found my way through the menus and calculated a route to my hotel in Charleston. Piece of cake. I had never used a navigation device before, and had heard horror stories about cumbersome, clunky boxes with ironically unnavigable menus. Boy, navigation systems have come a long way.
 The c330 comes with a secure-fitting windshield mount, built-in speakers, built-in rechargeable battery, built-in maps, and a power cord. |
The unexpected fun-factor
It's difficult to avoid toying with the c330, despite its greater worth as a navigation tool. The display is cheerfully bright, and the icons are cartoonishly cute. The touchscreen is highly responsive and commands are lightning-fast. You can choose in which accent or language you want to listen to the voice prompts, too. I enjoyed listening to the British accent, though I could have chosen the American accent, or, if I was feeling really brave, Norsk or Suomi. If you just like maps, like me, well, you have an endless supply of nerdy enthrallment. It can be equally fun to see how many features you can access without cracking the owner's manual. You might be surprised how far you get.
 Enter a new destination ("where to"), or view a map of your current location or that of your destination ("view map"). |
My intuition says...
After you turn on the c330, the first screen you come to presents you with just four simple options. The first is "Where to?" That one's easy enough to figure out. Click on it, and you're given 6 "Where to" choices:
 Cute, clear icons help clicking through the menu options easy and fun. |
- "Address" — for when you know exactly where you're going
- "Food" — a travel essential
- "Lodging" — since you're obviously away from home
- "Fuel" — and obviously in a car
- "My Locations" — for personally stored places
- "Spell Name" — for everything else
You can scroll down for more specialized "Where to" options, such as "Entertainment," "Hospitals," and "Auto Services." The c330 comes loaded with over five million of these points of interest (POI) by the way, so you'll always be able to find something nearby.
 Once you've entered your destination, press "Go!" and your route is automatically generated from your current location. |
So, you program an address into the system. Then what? You're given three, very clear options. You can save it, view a map of it and its surroundings, or hit "Go" for immediate guidance from wherever you are. Hitting "Save" will store the address in "My Locations" — the best method for finding your way to frequented locations. This feature came in very handy once I was on the road. If you forget to save, which I often did, you can still find the address in "Recent Selections" under the "My Locations" tab.
The armchair tourist
Another great thing about storing addresses is that you can set a certain address as the "set location." That means that wherever you decide to go next, the c330 will calculate the route from that set location. So, after setting my hotel as the set location, I previewed the route from my hotel to the church, while sitting in my living room 500 miles away. I found my way from the church to the reception and from the reception back to the hotel. I had witnessed my whole weekend driving adventure before I ever left the couch. Whether the c330 was accurate, though, was still left to be determined.
 You have several ways of customizing your route options, including avoiding tolls, avoiding highways, and arriving faster or taking the shortest route." |
A rough start
Starting out, I was instantly skeptical, as the route the c330 had calculated from my house to the highway was very different than what I had anticipated. But then I realized that this was my own fault. Having played with the c330 the evening before, I had changed the setting from "fastest route" to "shortest route," yielding a course wildly different than one I'm used to driving. This route involves a lot of turns, back roads, and stop lights. But mileage-wise, it's a shorter distance. If you want to get there fast, better to take the main roads and rack up a few more miles. I was definitely interested in getting there fast.
Taking one for the team
After I rectified my route to a faster one — and set the c330 to avoid toll roads, too — I confidently continued on towards Charleston. Now, you're discouraged from fiddling with any navigation device while moving, and the c330 comes with the "Safe Mode" automatically on. That means that it prevents you from using certain functions while the car is in motion, such as all the "Where to" options. Come to a full stop and you get those functions back. You are certainly allowed to turn the safety mode off (why else would they include a button for it?), and I did. If you don't feel comfortable taking your eyes off the road, I'd suggest leaving it on. But, as I was testing the full functionality of this device, I felt compelled to turn it off.
 View the map in 3D, or with the top of the map always facing north, or with the top of the map pointing in the direction of travel, or as a split screen. I personally enjoyed the 3D option. |
Am I really going that fast?
I really enjoyed clicking through the different display screens. I went from a bird's eye view of my route to a 3D view. I zoomed in and out, depending on how far ahead I wanted to see (up to 23x zoom!) — zooming out for highway travel, and zooming in for city travel. (The c330 automatically makes these adjustments, too, and they're usually just the right amount of zoom.) I switched to the "turn in..." view, which presents a text preview and instructions for the next turn. But my very favorite view was a button in the lower left of the screen titled "arrival." That screen, designed to look like an instrument panel, showed all the nitty gritty details of my trip: current speed, current direction, distance traveled and distance left to go, average total speed, average moving speed, maximum achieved speed, total trip time, total time in motion, and total time while stopped. I had no idea that my speedometer was 10 miles too slow. Making up for that discrepancy made my journey much more fun.
 Even though my spedometer has me going at 80mph, the c330 clocks me at 71. |
A great dinner companion
The unit has a built-in battery too, so you can detach it from its base, sit in a diner, say, and calculate your way to the next diner, while plugging in a stop at the rest area between them. It also makes security very simple. Just detach it from the windshield mount (you don't even have to turn it off), put it in the glove box, or in my case, in my bag, and off you go.
 The c330 obviously got me to my destination, but can it find me a restroom? |
When your car needs to go
I also searched for gas stations, bathrooms, and eateries. I'm sad to report that this is an area that the c330 could improve on. Searching for a bathroom was the first non-intuitive snag I'd hit with the c330. Under the "where to" tab, you have a total of 18 search categories, whether for a specific address or for a POI. You'd think one of those would be "restrooms." Strangely, the only entry I found for this kind of public facility was under "auto services." Last time I checked, relieving oneself was a human service and not an auto service, but I could be mistaken. Perhaps the makers of the Garmin c330 have bladders of steel.
 Searching for a new destination while already en route brings up this screen, which shows these green arrows pointing in unexplained directions. Good thing you have the option of viewing a map of each new destination before you decide to go there. |
A little sooner would be nicer
The other area where the c330 is slightly lacking is providing information in a user-friendly way when searching for a POI while driving. It's easy to search for a restaurant, say, but once you're confronted with a list of restaurants, these odd green arrows appear that point in curious directions. Not even the manual says what they're pointing to. Is it the direction I'm driving in (in which case, they'd all be pointing the same way), or is it the direction I'd have to go to get to the restaurant? I could never be sure. Fortunately, the same restaurant list does provide the distances from your current location to each restaurant. And, once you choose a restaurant, you can hit the "show map" tab for a preview of where the restaurant is in reference to your current location. However, I would have preferred a little more guidance in the decision-making process of where to eat at an earlier point in the search.
It's a keeper
But, on the whole, the c330 performed beautifully. I made it to every single destination I had to find, even after I took wrong turns (my own fault). The c330 is remarkably fast at recalculating a route when you've gone off course. Usually, the computer figures out you've made a wrong turn within 100 yards of the mistake, and takes just a few seconds to recalculate a new route. And I was very impressed with how accurate the maps and directions were. I was dealing with a lot of spaghetti junctions, on-ramps and off-ramps, side-roads and alleyways, and rural roads. Driving through busy or confusing junctions, like those going into and out of Charleston, where I made the majority of my wrong turns, the c330 was always there with a way to get me back on track. You really couldn't ask for a more reliable or patient wedding date.
