Garmin's Hands-Free Car GPS

LAS VEGAS--Garmin's PR people showed off their latest and greatest GPS devices by giving journalists (such as me) rides to their hotel from the Las Vegas airport.

By far the coolest newcomer--if it really works in the wild--is the new Nuvi 880, which they say is the first completely hands-free navigation system. It uses speech recognition technology--but so you don't drive it nuts with non-navigation-related car talk, the speech reco is only activated when you press the button on a little strap designed to be wrapped around the steering wheel.

Here's a photo of the Nuvi 880 and the speech activation strap:

In the test drive, the device did occasionally falter as Garmin's representative asked it to locate places by category (e.g. restaurants, coffee shops) or navigate back to a previous screen. But it mostly worked (which it better, given the $1000 price tag) and we'll look forward to trying it out when it ships, which Garmin says will be this spring.

Read PC World's ongoing coverage of this giant technology show at our CES InfoCenter.

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