Review of the Garmin nuvi 680

Now this is something that was built by something other than the French. Oh, let me back up.

What is it? It's a portable GPS satnav device. Well portable in that it fits in a coat pocket or a purse, but not your front shirt pocket. They provide a mounting kit for you to place it in your car when you're driving. The mounting kit comes with enough options that you shouldn't have problems finding a spot for it.

It has some nice big bolts. An SD card slot for instance. It also has the look of something that might take a hit from hard pavement too. A truckish look about it. I like hardware to be a little rugged. It's an unpredictable world out there. Never know what's going to happen next.

However, it is a little polished piece of equipment despite its lack of oo la la. Like the iPhone, it has a touchscreen interface for everything, (however) it doesn't look as purty, but (however again) it's a joy to use. When you hit a button, by God, you're hitting the button. Every single time. No mistuned timeouts here.

Like all the other GPS satnav units out there, it does moving maps 2D and 3D (no 4D) and will calculate routes to addresses you can enter by hand or you can look up businesses by name and it will pull the address for you. The moving maps are standard Garmin - if you've used a Garmin nav unit in an airplane, this one shouldn't surprise you at all. The GPS receiver doesn't seem to have the frontage road tracking problem I've seen with other units - kudos to Garmin for figuring that one out.

The route calculation software will not find you the optimal route, but it will get you to where you want to go. However the routing calculations are done fairly quick - I can understand the tradeoffs here. I don't use the routing software at all - I just leave it in moving map mode for the most part.

It has an mp3 player built in. It has an FM transmitter built in. However, the FM transmitter's strength is unacceptably weak, in my opinion. The FM frequency band is pretty much all filled up around most big cities these days - you need something that can punch through the noise, and this doesn't do it. So if you want to listen to mp3s, you're going to have to do it through the builtin speakers on the unit itself, which sound a bit tinny.

It comes with a service called MSN direct, which is free for one year. The service provides two useful bits of information - weather and gas prices. I'll have to see whether the gas price info justifies paying money for a subscription renewal. I suspect not. I hope when the subscription runs out the software doesn't nag you about it.

Supposedly, you can pair it with a bluetooth phone, and if you plug in a microphone into the unit, you can use your phone in hands free mode. I haven't tried that functionality, mainly because I leave my cell turned off unless I'm at a full stop.

So in summary, it's a nice practical polished piece of hardware and software. The FM transmitter doesn't really work though.