Garmin Nuvi 760

Photo gallery: Garmin Nuvi 760

Design
The Nuvi 760's silver flecked, almost-black body with faux metal piping looks nice but, at first glance, you'd be hard pressed to tell it apart from its less expensive stablemate, the Nuvi 260W. Despite Garmin stating the 760's dimensions as 122mm wide, 20mm deep and 71mm tall, the 760 is actually a few poofteenths wider than the 260W. Within its neat, if not terribly glamorous, body there's a class standard 4.3-inch, 480x272 pixel touchscreen.

Aside from the screen, the dimpled slider power switch along the top left corner is the 760's sole physical human interface. A moderately sized speaker is positioned at the rear, which has a good volume range, from whisper quiet to shouting-at-the-bar loud. It does crackle a little though when you turn the volume up to 11.

Garmin's advertising centres around its easy-to-use interface and, generally speaking, they're right but the company did step into a few design potholes. It all starts off well when you boot the 760 up and get past the "prevent Garmin from being sued" safety message, as there's a simple main menu with just two large icons (Where To? and View Map), as well as two smaller icons for the settings and volume screens.

With the engineers at Garmin chanting the mantra of keep things simple stupid, they decided that the default map display would omit non-major roads and details. A nice idea, in theory. But, like communism, it fails in reality, because as you're driving along streets it drops in and out of view making it hard to figure out how far away your next turn is. And unlike the lesser 260W, upgrading the firmware doesn't (at this stage) fix the problem; the only way around it is to set the map detail level to maximum.

Aside from that. the map screen is decent viewing on a daily basis. Instructions are displayed along the top, while a bar down the bottom features the Menu button, current speed/arrival time and compass heading. Statistics on the current trip can be viewed by clicking on the speed/arrival time, whereas stabbing either compass direction or turn instruction will bring up various views of the turn-by-turn instructions.

Keying in destinations is a pleasant affair thanks to a fairly swift auto-completion feature and the 760's on-screen QWERTY keyboard, although you'll have to rummage through the settings to change it from the default ABC layout. Should you feel the need to tinkle with such settings while you're at the traffic lights, bear in mind that getting back to the map display can take a seemingly inordinate number of clicks.

Installing the 760 in the car is an act almost as simple as putting one foot in front of the other and walking. The compact windshield mount features a ball joint that clicks into the 760's cradle; this ball joint allows the 760 to be moved side-to-side and up-and-down for a good degree of viewing adjustment.

Features
The extra AU$150 that the 760 costs over the 260W nets a number of additional features, over and above the QWERTY keyboard that's missing from the lesser unit. Namely, Bluetooth hands-free and an FM transmitter. We had no problem pairing up phones from various brands — Nokia, HTC and Palm — but the sound quality from the built-in speakers wasn't fantastic, as a fair amount of crackle made comprehension difficult.

Things improved quite markedly when we flicked on the 760's FM transmitter. Driving around town we did encounter some patches of town which induced more background static than others but, on the whole, it was more than acceptable. The transmitter was well suited to the Nuvi 760's ability to play MP3 music stored on an SD card, with audio playback cut whenever a route instruction was issued. The other multimedia feature, the picture viewer, works surprisingly well, albeit slowly, for a standard resolution screen.

From our time with the 260W, we knew that Garmin's red light and speed camera warnings were winners except for one very important thing, they're not preloaded on the device — a real shame for a device being marketed on its ease of use. To get these warnings you'll have to go to Garmin's website, find the special Points of Interest (POI) files and install them onto the 760. Finding these files is a far from trivial exercise — there's no link to them from the home page, for instance — so, if you already own a Garmin device, check out our step-by-step guide on installing Garmin's speed and red light camera warnings.

Performance
Once installed you'll get some underwhelming visual markers on the map — a red dot for red light cameras, a camera icon for speed cameras — but also some great audible alerts. Instead of the generic chime that most GPS makers opt for, Garmin uses a verbal alert, such as "red light camera ahead" and "40km school zone ahead". However, the pre-recorded male voice used for these alerts can be a bit of a shock at first if you're using a female voice for spoken instructions.

Starting up the 760 takes about 15 seconds which, when coupled with the sometimes lengthy wait for satellite lock on, can mean speedy getaways are difficult to do. At times the 760 selected routes more circuitous than we're used to from GPS navigation devices, but otherwise it's generally the same old deal with satellite navigation performance. As expected, the 760's usefulness in guiding you around town is marred by bounced satellite signals which often leads the Garmin to think it's on a dank, dark city alleyway instead of cruising down a thoroughfare.

And, as is the norm, routes are far from optimal but they'll get you to your destination. More annoying, however, is the inability to specify roads or areas to avoid; the best that can be done is ask for a detour, which may or may not have the desired affect, or ignore the 760 for a while and wait for it to re-route you along a more sane route.

Conclusion
After our experience with the TomTom Go 720's weak FM transmission — not to mention its myriad of bugs — we were apprehensive about the Garmin Nuvi 760. Thankfully it cast aside our doubts like Salome did with John the Baptist's head, so if you're keen on a GPS with a built-in FM transmitter and MP3 playback, the Nuvi 760 is the one to go for.