Finally, a simple aftermarket navigation product
Garmin C330
The product: The C330 is the little sparrow of in-car GPS units, compared to most of the dinosaur dash-mounted systems being sold today. It's much smaller and lighter than competing car-mount navigation systems, for one thing, and it's much easier to use.

There's nothing that the C330 will do that you can't also find in a current product, but the C330 does it much more easily. It's easy to enter your destination on the clear touch screen, it's easy to read the small but clear color LCD screen, and it's easy to mount the unit in the car since it's so small and light (0.59 pound). In many ways, the C330 is the GPS unit for the rest of us. It is a brilliantly executed product.

Other features:

• Complete U.S. maps built in (the less-expensive C320 requires you download them from your PC)
• Detour function, for when you run into an impassable road
• Preprogrammed with streets, restaurants, ATMs, and gas stations
• Selectable top-down or three-dimensional map display

The price: $899 for the C330 (preloaded with U.S. maps); $699 for the C320 (you have to load maps onto its included 128MB SD card). Ships in February.

The prospects: Navigation systems have been slow to find their way in the U.S. market, but a product such as this, which is really easy to install, use, and move, could help make a dent. The downsides are that it's still a very expensive purchase and that it does not download real-time traffic data and automatically route you around traffic jams, as some of the latest systems from car manufacturers Acura and Cadillac and aftermarket vendors Pioneer and Alpine do.

By Rafe Needleman, editor, CNET Reviews