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February 7, 2007

Garmin nuvi 680 Review

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GPSmagazine Rating: 4 of 5
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37. Pros

  • Beautiful, super-bright, white backlit screen is easy to read even in sunlight, living up to Garmin's claim of "sunlight readable display")
  • Slim, portable design
  • Integrated FM transmitter
  • NAVTEQ Mapping Data
  • Mapping data is stored in memory rather than a hard disk, making the unit very lightweight and less susceptible to hard disk failure or damage from dropping.
  • SiRF's Star III GPS chipset yields phenomenal performance. I even got 4 out of 5 signal strength bars indoors! The SiRF enabled nuvi performed well in Manhattan's GPS challenging urban environment, tracking even behind tall buildings and short tunnels.
  • Excellent routing engine
  • Fast boot/shutdown times
  • Bluetooth / Cell phone integration works well and is thoughtfully implemented (nuvi handles things like call waiting, pausing music playback during a call, etc.)
  • Solid windshield mount keeps the unit secure and in place. The nuvi is easy to angle on the mount, and it doesn't vibrate or shift while driving.
  • Includes everything you need to receive real-time traffic data
  • WebUpdater software makes updating the nuvi's internal software easy
  • Fast CPU performance: the nuvi is zippy and responsive. Navigating menus is quick, and route / re-route calculation is fast
  • Good quality internal microphone works well for hand-free telephone.
  • Long battery life (up to 8 hours per charge)
  • Lots of configurable options
  • Capability to add travel guides
  • Support for loading custom POIs
  • Ability to route to lat/long coordinates
  • Garmin has finally added the ability to pan the map when looking at the map view
  • Garmin is a mature company and everything here just works the way it's supposed to. No unpleasant surprises, or buggy code. Software feels well tested and thoughtfully implemented.

38. Cons

  • Weak FM transmitter. nuvi needs to be very close to the car stereo for good performance
  • Limited MSN Direct coverage areas.
  • Can take up to 20 minutes to receive MSN-Direct data once you're in an MSN coverage area
  • No route exclusion feature (ability to exclude certain roadways when choosing a route)
  • No multi-destination address optimizing (you can have multiple stops on a route, but the nuvi cannot tell you the most efficient order for the stops)
  • No physical volume control (you have to navigate the menus to adjust the volume, although this is less of an issue if you're using the FM transmitter to use your car's stereo instead of the nuvi's internal speaker)
  • Sometimes the nuvi waits too long to reroute -- If you miss a turn, I found the nuvi waiting a nail-biting amount of time before finally accepting the fact that I had missed the turn and it needed to re-calculate.
  • No way to sort the address book alphabetically - the entries always appear in order of closeness to your current position.
  • When typing out a street name, it's not intuitive where the delete (backspace) key is (it's buried on the top right as a gray left arrow).
  • No mp3 playlist capability

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