Garmin Nuvi 1340 4.3" Sat Nav with UK and Western Europe Maps

This is the first sat nav I have ever bought, so I spent quite a bit of time reading reviews and talking to friends with sat navs.

I've read some negative reviews about the nuvi 1340, but decided to take the plunge and so far - five days in - I haven't been disappointed.

It is very easy to use. The screen is big and clear, the instructions concise and easy to understand. It updates and recalculates routes, when I have purposefully gone the wrong way, very quickly. There are other useful functions on there, like the points of interest, and the 'where am i' function would be very useful in an emergency. Safety camera alerts are a Godsend.

I appreciate that different people have different expectations, but I'm quite demanding and wouldn't waste my money on a pile of tosh, so I can recommend this sat nav.

***Update***

I've had it for about five months now and still think that it is fantastic. It has got me around the UK and Europe with no problems at all. It was great for finding a petrol station in the middle of France when I needed one on the hurry up, for finding a cashpoint when driving around rural England and for finding a Thai restaurant in Bournemouth when we decided what we wanted to eat on a whim. Ten minutes and we were there.

What's more, all that driving and no points on my licence thanks to the camera alerts.

This sat nav is a very, very useful piece of kit.

FOR:- As the title suggests, it does what its supposed to. But what really impressed me
was how quickly it re-routes you should you need to take a diversion. I have borrowed
an older model Gamin from a friend from time to time but this cerainly does the trick.

AGAINT:- The only small complaint, even though it has a reasonable sized screen, is
that the qwerty touch screen can be a little fiddly to hit the right letter / key at times.
This could be made better if a stylus was included, the top of a pen did the trick for me.

OVERALL:- I still give it a 5***** rating

This is the first satnav I have bought, which I bought especially for a holiday in France. I have no problem with map reading or with British road signs but I thought this would make life easier. It was worth every penny. There were two things I found invaluable. One was the current speed shown next to the speed limit in the bottom right corner. I barely looked at my speedometer as it's not so easy to read kmh. At times the speed limit was 70kmh, whereas the satnav said 90kmh, but this was just for short stretches of road and was so clearly marked on road signs that it wasn't a problem. The other useful thing was following it on roundabouts. It was very easy just to follow the pink line, turning right onto a roundabout and following it until you need to come off. In retrospect I was lucky not to hit another car as I realised I was looking more at the satnav than the road!

It is set for the default quickest journey setting and a couple of times we looked like we were coming off the beaten track a bit, but when I looked at a map afterwards we had just cut some corners. And it meant it took us on some prettier routes. We couldn't work out if it was being helpful or sarcastic when you are stuck in a traffic jam for a while and it asks if you want to switch to pedestrian mode!

I downloaded the instructions but didn't really look at them after discovering the help function on the satnav. Besides, I have teenagers who quickly worked out what to do!

My daughter gave me a stylus from her Nintendo DS which lives in the case. This was a great help. Firstly the fingerprints on the screen showed up when it was really sunny, and also it made it easier for me to reach if it was already attached to the windscreen.

I used it locally before we went to France to get used to it and followed our usual routes, even when it tried to take me a different route. It very quickly recalculates the route.

It comes with a free map upgrade within 60 days. The original map had a lot of wrong settings for petrol local to me but these were corrected with the download. The download did take a very long time but hopefully I won't need to do that again for a while anyway.

I would definitely recommend this.