July 15, 2005

New Products - Garmin StreetPilot i2 and i3

Continuing the huge string of new product releases today, Garmin announced new additions to their StreetPilot line, the Garmin i2 (shown at right) and Garmin i3(shown below). Both are about the size of a baseball, and are designed to be entry level additions to the StreetPilot line of car GPS receivers. While they are small, they seem to offer a lot.

Navigation within the interface software is via a front mounted click wheel, but offers voice promted turn by turn directions through the built in speaker. With its suction cup mount and 12v cable, it can easily move with you from car to car. (They will run about 6 hours on 2 AA batteries when 12v power is not available). They ship with the MapSource select North America NT DVD, which enables you to download map data and Points of Interest (POI) information via USB to the units. They ship with 128MB Transflash cards, which are a fraction of the size of the very common SD cards. An interesting and potentially highly useful feature is the ability to upload your own Points of Interest (POI), in bulk via a CSV format. You can then set an alarm for proximiaty to those POIs, warning you when you get close. This can be particularly useful if you upload the location of Safety Cameras that monitor for speeders, or running red lights.
StreetPilot i3
What's the difference? The screens. The Streetpilot i2 is monochrome, and the i3 is color.

StreetPilot i2 display: 1.3in W x 1.7in H, 176 x 240 pixels, high contrast monochrome FSTN with backlight.
StreetPilot i3 display: 1.3in W x 1.7in H, 176 x 220 pixels, 32k-color TFT with backlight

More information on the Garmin StreetPilot i2 is available at their website.
Street Price $321

More information on the Garmin StreetPilot i3 is available at their website.
Street Price $429