ANNE'S TEST
Cole is a great guy for a lot of little reasons. For one, he isn’t afraid to say he’s lost. Which is good because he gets lost a lot. I suspect Cole might even get lost as an excuse to stop and get directions at a place that sells potato chips. It’s as if he needs to leave a trail of chip crumbs to get home, which—as Hansel and Gretel have already shown—doesn’t work. So then we need to stop again and buy more chips and maybe an iced tea and some candy. The Garmin c330 StreetPilot GPS Vehicle Navigator is a real calorie saver.

I was a little worried when I took the StreetPilot out of the box. I couldn’t find the directions. Well, that’s how easy it is to use. Plug it into the car’s “cell phone lighter,” and you are ready to go anywhere in the United States, Canada, or Puerto Rico.

The StreetPilot has a simple touch-screen interface that prompts you along. Our six-year-old—thick with the pride of a new reader—figured it out in minutes. Of course, he also quickly realized that we now had no excuse to hit the Quickee Mart for the j-food. Luckily, he was able to find a bag of cheese crackers in the backseat. (Don’t ask how old the crackers were. I’ve always said we could wait out a blizzard foraging in the car.)

There are several ways to get info from the StreetPilot. Maps can appear in either the traditional “bird’s eye” view or in a three-dimensional format. Or you can choose written directions. The StreetPilot also talks and can tell Cole exactly where to get off.

Using the StreetPilot to drive around your rural backwater hometown, you quickly discover that the GPS has geographical limits. But when we used it on a weekend trip across the state, it was 100 percent correct. I even typed in the name of our bank and it told us the nearest ATM.

Cole is a great guy for a lot of little reasons. Like when we stop at the gas station, happily knowing exactly where we are as we drive with our StreetPilot, and he buys potato chips—and M&M’s, just because he knows I like them.

COLE'S TEST
StreetPilot is my copilot. And Anne couldn’t be happier. I’m usually pretty levelheaded, but put me behind the wheel of a car and I become, well, a moron. Ask me to go somewhere new, or to attempt the unholy nightmare called “city driving,” and it’s like I’ve been blindfolded and thrown into a Tilt-a-Whirl. Simple concepts like “right” and “left” and “stop sign” lose all meaning. Literally and meta­ phorically, I’m lost. This makes me anxious, which in turn makes me stupid. And, like many guys, I deal by yelling and embracing the clichéd refusal to stop for directions. Stopping for a snack, however, has never been a problem.The StreetPilot c330 GPS navigator from Garmin doesn’t care about any of that.