Remember stand-alone GPS units for your car? The mostly square, chubby little touchscreen devices that barked directions at us as we drove used to be suction-cupped to nearly every auto on the road. Like iPods, portable game players, and walkie talkies, the smartphone has all but obviated the need for dedicated GPS units, outside of specific industries.

But while the popularity of these little personal navigation assistants has waned dramatically over the past seven or eight years, they do still exist, and companies like Garmin are still developing new models. The latest, and most high-end, of these new models is the nüviCam LMTHD, an awkwardly named $399.99 GPS unit that is desperately trying to be more than just a thing that serves directions.

If you used to (or still do) have a GPS unit, it was probably pretty bulky, not very attractive, and it likely had a resistive touchscreen that was obsolete the second the first iPhone was announced. The nüviCam is none of those things: it’s a sleek, tablet-like device with a big, 6-inch capacitive display and a cool magnetic mount that snaps it to its windshield-mounted dock. It’s metal instead of plastic, and while it’s not as thin as the latest smartphones or tablets, it’s certainly far better than the GPS units of yore. It still has a laughably short 30 minute battery life, which is really just there to let you restart your car without restarting the unit. The 6-inch display has a low, WVGA (800 x 480 pixel) resolution that would be laughable on a smartphone or tablet, but it’s fine here. You’re not reading email or watching video on the nüviCam, and since it’s a few feet away when mounted in your car, you never actually see the pixels of the display. More important than resolution is that the display is visible in bright sunlight, and the nüviCam doesn’t have any issues there. The 6-inch screen is bright and visible in direct sunlight But what makes the nüviCam different from every other GPS unit that preceded it is the camera on its backside. The camera serves two purposes: it’s a dash cam that can constantly record as you drive and save clips whenever it detects an impact or possible accident (there are two microSD slots for storage), and it’s a driver safety device that alerts you when you get too close to the vehicle in front or if you drift outside the painted lines on the road.

A clip of me going over a bump in the road (at 0:31), which the nuviCam LMTHD recorded as an "incident." You can also hear the alert when I drift over the solid white line later in the video.