Garmin's Travel Guide ships on a pre-programmed SD memory card.

Installing the Travel Guide is extremely easy: simply power on the Garmin GPS (nuvi or StreetPilot c500 series) and insert the SD card.

Once the SD memory card is inserted, the GPS will automatically recognize the card and display the screen shown above. If you want to proceed with installing the Travel Guide, tap "OK", otherwise hit Cancel.

The GPS will ask if you want to copy the data to your GPS (nuvi in this case). The Travel Guide data for North America only consumes about 21 MB of disk space, so you'll still have about 547 MB of free space left for photos, music, and other files. Note that the Garmin nuvi's and StreetPilot c500's have about 2 GB of disk storage total, of which 1.33 is used by Garmin for the operating system and mapping data. Of course, you can always add more space via the SD memory card slot.

Copying over the data takes about 2 minutes...

Once the travel guide data has finished copying over from the SD card to the GPS' internal storage, you can access the new POI data by tapping on "Travel Kit" from the Main Menu, and then "Travel Guide".

In order to search for POIs using the Travel Guide, you need to tell the GPS where you want to search. You can search all of North America by tapping on "All Categories", scroll through the list to find the city you're interested in, or tap "Near..." to search near your current location or spell out a specific city name.

It's worth mentioning that if you tap "Near..." and are either not in a city that Fodors has included in the travel guide, or manually specify a city name that's not in the Travel Guide, you're presented with the list of cities again. Initially this behavior confused me, and I suspect most other users will be confused too. Instead of displaying a message that says "That city is not included in the Travel Guide", or automatically selecting the closest city to you, you just keep seeing the list of city names to choose from.

Fodor's includes data for about 70 cities and parks in North America.

Once you enter a city name that's contained in the Travel Guide, the GPS displays a list of categories to choose from. Available categories are:

• All Categories
• Restaurant
• Hotel
• Nightlife
• Shopping
• Sights
• Travel Tips
• Overview
• Highlights

Each POI in the Travel Guide can be routed to by tapping on the large green "Go!" button, saved to the address book by tapping on "Save", or viewed on the map by tapping on "Map".

Fodor's review information is provided for each POI, as shown above.

Pros

• Fodors travel guide library for entire North America region
• Provides some additional, valuable information about each POI
• Highlights category handy for exploring new cities
• Easy installation

Cons

• Relatively few cities included in the data
• Limited amount of data included for each city
• Can not search the Travel Guide by closeness to your current location
• Travel Guide data not integrated with the rest of the POI database - you have to enter the Travel Kit to view the Travel Guide data

Conclusion

Garmin's Travel Guide for North America sells online for about $60, and includes abridged versions of Fodor's travel information for about 70 cities in North America. That's a pretty good bargain, considering each printed book sells for around $15. Still, I found the Travel Guide's usefulness seriously hampered by its inability to search near my current location. In other words, you have to search within a particular city, and even then there's only a limited amount of data available for each city. For example, within Boston or New York, you can use the Travel Guide to view which selected restaurants Fodor's recommends, but you won't be able to just search for the closest restaurant to your location and see a review of it.

The Garmin Travel Guide is probably best suited to those about to make a road trip to a particular city (or group of cities) and would otherwise purchase Fodor's printed books. But as a POI database to be used for general driving, the Travel Guide contains relatively few POIs, covers select major cities, and doesn't have a proximity search feature. I also would have liked to see some photography added to the Travel Guide data, as well as integrating the Fodor's data with the rest of Garmin's POI database so you don't have to look in two different places.

Magellan recently added AAA ToruGuide data to their Maestro 4xxx series GPS units, and the Fodor's information pales in comparison. AAA has detailed information on hundreds of thousands of POIs, even in the most remote of areas, and allows you to search by proximity rather than a specific city name.

If you considering buying a Fodor's travel book for a planned road trip to a city Fodor's has reviewed, the Garmin Travel Guide might be worth a look. Otherwise, save the $60.