Garmin Upgrades Navigation Engines, Traffic Features

By Doug Olenick On Sep 8 2011 - 4:01am

NEW YORK — Garmin has added an updated navigation engine and upgraded traffic features to many of the models in its 2012 portable navigation device (PND) line.

This year’s rollout marks the first time the company has introduced all its products in one fell swoop, a company spokesman said. The usual practice was to push out a new model every few months, but the company determined the approach confused customers who could not tell which model in a store was the most recent.

The new practice will ensure only the newest models are on display at any one time, the company said.

Another first for the company is the $99 suggested starting price point, which appears in the entry-level Essential line. Previously, Garmin products were priced less than $100 only during sales and Black Friday-type events, the company said.

The Essential line, which consists of the Nuvi 30, 40 and 50 series, features spoken street names, screens ranging from 3 inches to 5 inches, and suggested retails ranging from $99 to $179. The Nuvi 40 and 50 add free lifetime maps. All are geared toward consumers interested in a secondary navigation unit or a gift for students.

The two-SKU Advanced line, which consists of the Nuvi 2405 and 2505 at $169 to $249, add Garmin’s Guidance 2.0 navigation engine, which includes a greatly increased database of street-junction views — 60,000 compared with the 3,000 in older models — and 3D Traffic, which now includes many new traffic-source feeds delivered via analog FM radio. It also features Traffic Trends, which incorporates a historical database of actual road speeds at various times of the day. Screen sizes are 4 and 5 inches.

In the Prestige line, three Nuvi 3400 series models are priced from $329 to $399 and add Guidance 3.0 navigation engine, which includes MyTrends, which remembers favorite routes and destinations and predicts a destination so a driver need not input all data.

The 3D Traffic function has been updated to include traffic information delivered by FM HD Radio every 30 seconds, and covers more side streets and secondary roads. They are Garmin’s first models with HD Radio traffic.

The Prestige models also add pinch-to-zoom touchscreen and Safe Texting, which reads a cellphone’s text message via Bluetooth.