my nuvi 350 has a personality!

I don't own a 350 but these receivers sometimes act weird. Sometimes, I am tempted to knock the receiver on the ground for not behaving right - I bought it to work right. Then I pause: knocking it on the ground would not make it work better. It's no human that you can force to think right. This does not help with the 350 problem but you will not have to wait too long for an answer on this forum. The experts are here.

When it happens, does it happen in the same vicinity each time? I've seen a similar problem on my Nuvi 350 with the old NA 2008 map. There was a spot on a road about 5 miles from where I live where the unit would sometimes get pretty confused, and it would announce "turn left on Big Horn Road" instead of "turn left on Washington street". (Big Horn was at least a couple blocks away, and was not connected to the street I was on). Once I turned left on Washington Street, it would say "Continue 2 miles on Washington Street". I suspect there are some "knots" in the Navteq database that confuse the routing algorithm. If instead of a named road, you were picking up an phantom un-named road, that might explain why it was not announcing the street name.

Even worse, was a spot near a shopping mall where instead of turning right, it wanted me to go a bit past the road, make a U-turn, then turn left (like reverse jug-handle). It's almost like the two roads intersected at two different points depending on which direction you were coming from.

This is just a function of the software. When you approach the turn, the unit will tell you to turn on the street name. I have noticed this on the 750 as well and it seems to happen only when the next turn is within a mile of the one I just made.

Yep - I observed this with both the 350 and 760 and with the 2008 & 2009 maps.

It could be worse.

I used to navigate with my 76CSx and City Select v7. When in Paradise, CA it would lock hard at a certain location - every time. Other places in that town it would direct me to turn on roads that didn't exist and, judging by the forest in the way, had never existed.

I had some other issues as well. Even after updating to City Navigator 2008 it still directed me to get on the freeway nearest to my home using the entrance at 5th Avenue. Of course there wasn't an entrance/exit there and never had been. Updating to City Navigator 2009 at least fixed that issue. I haven't been back up to Paradise for quite some time so I don't know about those issues.

I have a 350 and it has happened to me too although not very often.