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| Garmin nüvi 360 3.5-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Text-To-Speech | 
 enlarge | Brand: Garmin
Category: CE
List Price: $279.99
Buy New: $174.99
You Save: $105.00 (38%)
New (34) Used (12) Refurbished (9)
Avg. Customer Rating:  1122 reviews
Sales Rank: 19
Color: Li-Io
Media: Electronics
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: Yes
Native Resolution: 320x240
Display Size: 3.5
Includes MP3 Player: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 3.9 x 0.9 x 2.9
Array:
Legal Disclaimer: Warranty does not cover misuse of product.
Warranty: Garmin nüvi products purchased through Troy Ford will receive a full 3-Year Warranty. This is a FULL 2-Years longer than the warranty a consumer would receive, if a similar product was purchased through a consumer retailer.
MPN: 010-00538-00
Model: 010-00538-00
UPC: 753759058845
EAN: 0053759058846
ASIN: B000EXS1BS
Release Date: October 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 We Got A Good One November 11, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Sometimes you make a purchase of something your not familiar with and later regret your purchase and wish you had bought a different model. Not so with the Garmin Nuvi 360. We hit the mother load with this little baby.
I give it an A+ for all features except blue tooth. I don't use it because everyone complains when I'm using it. I think it works better with some phones. Mine is an LG from Verizon.
It amazes me how much info. they can pack in the little thing.
Final words- NO REGRETS
 yes it is great, but here is why it sucks November 10, 2007
8 out of 19 found this review helpful
don't get me wrong, this is a great product. the following works well:
- works out of the box
- mp3 player
- bluetooth phone sync is perfect, even got my addressbook (500+ names) out of the blackberry in a few seconds
here is why it sucks:
you have to search for things by category, say i'm at a lake and want to search for nearby marina, i type in marina, it doesn't find zilch. if i knew exactly what i wanted, why would i need a gps with points of interest?
same goes for many other 'points of interests' as they are called, so all in all i ended up using google maps on my blackberry to find things, entering the exact address on the nuvi and then going there. this pretty much beats the point of having a gps for me.
Even better than the 350 November 8, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
We had the Nuvi 350 (stolen) and replaced it with the 360. We liked both models, but the upgrade is significant and worthwhile: the 360 has bluetooth as well as destinations with phone numbers. It not only gets you to your destination, it finds the business and dials the number for you... Wow, now THAT is useful!
 Great with a few minor complaints November 3, 2007
42 out of 45 found this review helpful
I have bought two 360's, one for my wife and one for me and will buy a third (as a replacement), so I'm a fan and I would recommend a Nuvi over any other competing product hands down. However, that doesn't mean there aren't issues:
A few plusses and minuses:
ON THE PLUS SIDE
1) There is no better product on the market for GPS and the rest of them are toys by comparison. The interface is so wonderful that it's the GPS equivalent of the iPhone. There are minor issues but they're not worth discussing. I could write pages on how wonderful the interface is, but everyone else has done the product justice already.
2) The 360 is the size to buy unless you are vision impaired. It is small and thin and light and you can stick it in a pocket.
3) Maybe it's silly but I really like the audio book and mp3 feature. I use it constantly.
4) The Europe software is awesome. Travelling with a Nuvi in Europe is unbelievably less stressful. I've covered every country and it's wonderful. I would ask that they buy some database of tourist attractions because I ended up programming most of my own. And yes, eastern europe is twitchy and limited but it's still much better than paper maps. I used it all over Moscow and St Petersburgh and it was fine.
5) The usb charging is wonderful and some phones like smartphones share charging plugs limiting the number of cords you have to carry. The clamps, and connectors are well designed, and easy to work with. THe use of SD cards for map data rather than relying on PC connections is great. The abilty to store mp3's and audiobooks on SD cards is useful. I carry a set of SD cards and this means I dont need to carry a separate unit while travelling.
ON THE MINUS SIDE
1) The web site is awful, uninformative, and customer-unfriendly. The mandatory registration is awful to use, and confusing. In the support area, they clearly want to protect themselves from customers rather than explaining clearly what they can and cannot do for customers. They make it far too hard to contact them. Whoever does their web site thinks far too much like they are talking to their distributor channel and is entirely ignorant of their customers. For example, they bundle all customers and products together and treat them the same even though the products, while having similar functions are for very different customers with different skill levels.
2) The product is fairly fragile. It is complicated technology, and it is not housed in protective shells, and breaks easily. I have broken the screen on one by dropping it on a (thinly) carpeted floor in a restaurant, and broken the audio output plug on another unit simply by keeping the earphones plugged in and wrapping the cord around the unit. There are too many reports of gps antenna problems as well. So the units are reasonably fragile given their intended purpose and their fairly high price tag.
3) Given their fragility their customer service is in the obvious position of having customers who break the unit try to blame the product, and the company is trying to evade responsibility for when the product fails during reasonable use. This is why customers are often unhappy with product support: because the product is actually fragile, the company will not say that the product is fragile, and then must dance with customers to find out if they can reasonably replace it or not. Instead, they should simply be honest with customers using the reason that it is advanced technology that is fragile, or they should change the housing and antenna and connectors so that they are less fragile. Anyway, that's the problem with support. THey don't want to talk to you. They have a reason why they don't talk to you - they're afraid to. They are not sophisticated in how they manage customers either on their web site or via the phone, and they are that way because they have too much channel influcence and not enough consumer orientation. They should hire a new VP of customer service from a major brand like Nike or Apple. (No I don't have any inside knowledge, I simply run one of the country's larger consultancies on such things).
4) The satellite reception and triangulation is still wanting and sometimes frustrating. The reception in cities, where it is actually hardest to navigate, and where you have the least reaction time as a driver is terrible. In New York, San Francisco, Chicago and even Pittsburgh, you can wait for ten minutes or more before the unit acquires sattelites and can give you directions, even if you seek out an open space like a small park. I stood in the shopping district in Chicago waving the unit in the air for twenty minutes acting like Verizon's "can you hear me now?" character trying to acquire sattelites so I could find the restaurant for my next meeting. Since this is NOT anywhere as bad a problem if you leave the unit running as it is if you turn it off and on again, there is a problem with the approach they're using. This is also a problem at airports, where you've rented a car and have to throw the unit up on the dashboard or hold it out a window for ten minutes waiting for it to acquire satellites before you can put it somewhere more visible and use it. As a person who is busy travelling, thats an issue. Unfortunately, the way around the problem is to leave it on all the time which the battery won't tolerate. I don't know where they're getting their batter life estimates from but if you use the thing much, the battery burns down in more like two or three hours than what's advertised. And there isn't a switch to kill the video in order to preserve battery life. (And no, don't add yet another button combination to the power button. It's like tapping out morse code as it is.)
5) The speaker is weak and distorts too easily. I end up driving with an earphone almost all the time. There is a tradeoff here in engineering terms, because if you make it much louder it's a power drain. While they've put Bluetooth in the unit, it's pointless because you can't hear the other person, the speaker distorts too easily at low volume (which is a bad product decision because better speakers are available), despite the fact that the microphone does work reasonably well. I have a Jaguar, a Porche and a Ferrari. They represent the full range of internal sound levels. The Jaguar is almost perfectly quiet, but the audio is still underpowered in that environment. (I won't even talk about how pointless it is in the Ferrari.) The unit's speaker is on the back, facing away from you. So if you hold the thing, or lay it down on cloth like a seat, you have to turn it up, which then puts the speaker into distortion mode. This product design choice relies on relection to improve the sound quality, and I undestand preserving the front of the device for screen only. But just putting a better speaker inside and facing it forward or even downward would be a better answer. "We have the technology" to make a seventies pop culture reference.
6) Response time given the weakness of the antenna is a problem. It looks like they wrote the software without changing the lead time on directions to reflect the driver's speed and frequency of turns. Driving around the UK for example, with the twisting little roads is difficult because unit does not give you notice in time for the turns. Once you get down to a lower number of sattelites, especially in London, the thing becomes effectively useless. Nothing is more annoying than having the cutely accented narrator tell you to turn right fourty feet after you've passed the turn.
7) The voice software isn't smart enough to recognize "St Albans Street" as "Saint Albans Street". It needs to smarten up regarding common abbreviations.
8) The foreign language software, for phrases and such, is so bad that it would be better not to include it. Really. It's terrible. And it is totally unsuited for the user interface. I mean, who has twenty minutes to look up how to ask for lunch?
So, whomever is in charge of the software for the product should get a promotion and bonuses. Whoever is in charge of product engineering, purchasing and manufacturing should get a talking to, and should work harder. Whoever is in charge of customer service should get demoted. Whoever is charge of the web site should be fired, and with predudice. I wonder, that since this sequence of problems is the OPPOSITE of what is difficult in product development, how this can happen in a company unless it's a senior management problem in the first place. Customer service is easy to get right. Software is almost impossible. Engineering is something the Japanese usually get right day in and day out, but American companies can't seem to: American engineers are too often rewarded for being cunning, and not for being wise, and that is the feeling I get when using the product. Hardware development tried to be cunning not wise.
And I also get the feeling that the executive management is unwisely cheap and still does not realize how great a product they have on their hands, and what to do about it. As it stands, a competitor with brains could improve on the software and engineering. So why not take advantage of the one thing that a competitor cannot so easily steal: the loyalty of customers who truly depend on the product, by making customer service the company's core competency?
This GPS is Great! October 28, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
We bought the Garmin 360 through Amazon and we could not be happier. The price was very good, the shipping was prompt and free, and the product is wonderful. We recently took a trip to downtown Atlanta to see a concert and the Garmin took us right to the Fox Theater with no problems. The Garmin paid for itself with just that one trip. This GPS is very user-friendly and the battery life is very good. The 360 is small enough to put in your pocket when you leave your car and yet has a very good size viewing screen. The text to voice feature is our favorite perk. Garmin is well worth your consideration.
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