1. Must be able to carry it in my pocket
2. Get the real time traffic
3. Have a FM transmitter
4. MP3 player
5. SD Card slot
6. Optional Bluetooth connectivity

Lucky for me,  Garmin nuvi 760 had all the features I wanted. After unpacking, figuring out how it works was pretty easy. I loved the compact size its black sleek look and its nice UI. However I was not very happy that it did not have a good user manual. Probably gadget challenged users may find it difficult.

First the cons: The map is not great – some roads which were in my older Honda GPS were missing, it is too slow to startup and I would have liked a faster processor in it. Sometimes the search takes a long time to complete. Above that, many screens does not have the Main Menu shortcut. Hence in some cases, we have to click Back button multiple times to get to the Main Menu (or Main Screen).

Due to the lack of user guide I was not sure why the traffic did not work some of the time. Later I found the Clearchannel traffic FM receiver is embedded in the car charger. So the traffic icon will disappear if you do not connect it to the car charger. The traffic functionality is great – I liked the fact that it tells me the delay on the right and it reroutes based on traffic. But the unfortunate thing is, it does not have the right traffic information on many of the surface roads and hence it reroutes to a surface street when there is traffic in the freeway. Unfortunately in some case we get stuck on surface road due to heavy traffic there!

The phone bluetooth connectivity was easy to setup and I was amazed to find that it could show the phone contact in the screen. After using iPhone and Blackberry, it is pretty inconvenient to use an up/down arrow in screen to browse through the phone book. It would be great if it had the iPhone like scroll interface or a thumb wheel on right to scroll through the list. Same is felt in the zooming of map. Panning can be done using your fingers but zooming can be done only by pressing the zoom in/out button. It would have been great if there was the iPhone like “pinch” functionality or even a press and rotate thumb ball to zoom.

MP3 player is pretty reasonable and loading music into an SD card and installing it in nuvi is a snap. Since it has FM transmitter, we can hear the songs in the FM radio. It is sad that the FM transmitter is not great and has lot of interference due to other FM radio stations. This will be especially true when you are driving beyond 20 miles. You have to constantly tune the FM transmitter to find an unused band. I hope FCC will create a few bands for personal use and that will only improve this situation.

After using it for few days, I can can definitely say that it is a great buy for $250.