5. Finding Addresses

Figure 33: Where to?

Figure 34: Choosing a destination address type

After tapping on "Where to?", the nuvi 680 prompts you to choose whether you'll be entering a street address (Address), going to the saved Home address (Go Home), searching for a point of interest (Food, Hotels...), choosing an address from the list of recently found destinations (Recently Found), choosing a saved address from the address book (Favorites), or routing to a cross street (Intersections). The Extras icon is for loading additional future custom POIs, such as speed camera locations, and other additional data Garmin may make available for purchase via their website.

Tapping on the MSN Direct butterfly icon allows you to search for nearby gas stations or movie theaters.

Figure 35: Choosing a destination address type, page 2

Tapping the more icon (the down-arrow on the bottom right corner) brings up additional choices for entering a destination address. Notice the three additional icons in figure 34: Cities allows you to route to a city center, Browse Map allows you to select a point on the map as a destination address to route to. Coordinates allows you to enter longitude and latitude coordinates as a destination address.

Figure 36: Entering an Address - Selecting the State

Selecting "Address" as the destination type brings up the State selection screen, shown above. To illustrate the address entry system on the nuvi 680, I'll be entering a destination address of 135 Central Park West in New York City.

By default the nuvi asks if you want to use the State you're currently in. To choose a different state, tap "Spell State".

Figure 37: Entering an Address - Choosing the city

The next step is selecting the city. If you know what city your destination address is in, you can enter it here. If you're not sure what city the destination address is in, you can choose to search all cities and have the nuvi produce a list of all cities that have street names that match your destination address.

Figure 38: Spelling out the city name

Spelling the city is easy. The nuvi asks you to spell out the city name until you have entered enough letters that it can guess which city name you are entering. In the example above, I'm typing out the city name Manhattan.

The larger screen on the nuvi 680 makes spelling out the city name easier than smaller devices, as the larger letters are easier to tap with your finger. My only complaint is that the nuvi doesn't gray out letters that wouldn't spell a valid city name. On the Magellan RoadMate GPS units, for example, only potentially valid letters are selectable, making text entry even faster and more accurate. With the nuvi, you can spell out any name you want. So if you make a typo, the unit might complain that no such city exists, and you have to backup and check the name you entered. Adding this predictive typing feature would be a welcome addition to Garmin's otherwise stellar interface.

Figure 39: Select City

As soon as I've entered the letters M-A-N-H, the list of possible matches appears, as shown in figure 38. Tap on the desired city name and move on to street name/number selection. In this case, I'll tap on Manhattan, NY.

Figure 40: Entering the House Number

Like most GPS units, the nuvi 680 asks you for the house number before the street name. I know this bothers some users, but it's never been an issue for me. To the best of my knowledge, only the TomTom GO units allow you to change the option to enter the street name before the house number.

Figure 41: Select Street

After entering the house number, the nuvi asks you to enter the street name. I start to spell out the street name until nuvi has enough letters that it can produce a short list of possible matches.

Figure 42: Street selection, search results

Once the nuvi produces a list of possible streets, I can tap on the correct one. In this example I'm routing to Central Park West, so I tap on "Central (Park, Park E...)".

Figure 43: Street selection, search results

I'm routing to 135 Central Park West, so I'll tap on 135 Central Park W. Notice that the nuvi also displays zip code information for the destination address.

Figure 44: Confirm address selection and go

After successfully entering the destination address of 135 Central Park W in Manhattan, I can now either view the address on the map, save it to my address book, or route to it by pressing the large green Go! button.