The features listed sold me on this unit as well as the very reasonable price offered at Costco of only $350, however after almost 2 months of constant companionship with it on my travels around the US, I’ve decided it isn’t the GPS for me. My review is more about what I didn’t like and got frustrated with than the specs, bells and whistles… as these frustrations can kill an otherwise very nice product. This may sound like more of a bitch session than a review, but I often think reviews sugar coat as most products have some great features (as this one does), but when you get so annoyed that you want to return the item I also think others would like to know about it to avoid the same issues.

MSN Direct and Media Issues

The biggest selling points for me were the MSN traffic/weather information and the ability to play MP3 music on the device from an SD card. I was very much looking forward to being routed nicely around traffic without having to know the area, to be able to check weather around me at a glance thus avoiding any torrential downpours on my motorcycle, and to listen to music all from the same device. These features didn’t turn out quite like I had hoped however.

I’m going to start with the MSN Direct features as they turned out to be the most disappointing. Let me preface it by saying that I was traveling far and wide… when I got to a city I was usually blowing right through it, which is not what the average user will be doing. Most users will probably use their GPS within the confines of their own city 90% of the time. BUT!! As a traveler, the MSN Direct features were almost completely worthless to me. After 14K miles and who knows how many cities, it only figured out that there was a traffic problem in maybe 3 places and then routed me in an ass backwards way that most likely caused me much more time and definitely more headache.

As examples of this: Into Chicago I hit traffic 40 miles outside of town that backed up the freeway for hours. I’m overheating on my bike and don’t know if I can take a side road or not. I’m trying to keep moving with the 5 mph traffic, monitoring my bike overheating, and frantically searching the map for a decent side road. Finally I take matters into my own hands and get off to find another route with the Nuvi screaming at me the whole time to get back on the freeway! Screw you Nuvi, I’m not going to do it!!

Another example is in Middle California. There was some traffic on the freeway, so it started to route me into the middle of the city. Well DUH!! It’s not going to be much better in there is it? So I’m stuck in traffic on even smaller city streets where there isn’t much room to make alternate choices and finally I end up back on the freeway about 5 miles further down the road. Waste of time, that one. Or… in Seattle, it decides to route me around traffic. Take this exit, and at the top of the exit, get back on the freeway… What? It did this two times before I stopped trusting it. Then when the real exit came up, I almost missed it because I was so tired of it crying wolf. I could go on an on with that feature.  Not only worthless to me but actually wished I could turn it off because when it started routing me around traffic it didn’t TELL me that’s what it was doing so I could decide.

The weather information was about the same. There isn’t an intuitive way to see what’s happening with the weather except it gives the current weather conditions where you are headed. Big deal!! What about between here and there? Weather should be similar to traffic. Alerting you if there is bad weather ahead such as thunderstorms, floods or whatever. Or at least give you the weather icons on the overhead map.

Ok, on to the music feature. This feature actually wasn’t bad and it kept me in music for 2 months, but I did find some annoying things about it. I had about 600 songs on an external SD Card. They were fully labeled with Artist, Song name, Album, Genre, etc in the ID3 tag so that the Nuvi could sort them appropriately. Within the Nuvi menu you can browse by Artist, Album, Genre and more or do “All” songs, or “All” in any of those browses. Fair enough. Not great but it works. The thing that annoyed me over and over is that if you change any of the browse options, and then go back, or the unit dies (which it did often) then you start back at song number one. There is no way to start on song number 200 and continue from there, you have to start on song number one, and hit next 200 times to get back there. So I ended up listening to the first quarter of my music over and over again. It’s the little things that kill.

There were also issues with the picture viewer, but I’ve got other fish to fry.

Like I said before, my circumstances were unique in my long distance traveling, but I think it just flushed out problems that would have cropped up anyway but just not have been as annoying as dealing with them every day.

Next is the gas prices listed through MSN Direct. Worthless again. The data isn’t complete or even near worth while. Every time I checked it, found the lowest price within 10 miles or so and started to travel to the gas station… I’d pass like 3 or 4 stations on the way that weren’t even listed in the MSN gas prices and were easily 10 to 15 cents cheaper than the cheapest listed. Easier just to look for a cheap place by myself.

Timezones. This is really an extreme case as how often do people travel between all four of the timezones… twice even? But of the 6 transitions, the Nuvi only caught one of them and asked if I’d like to change the time. Really it was MSN that was noticing the change and updating the Nuvi, but why couldn’t the Nuvi do this? The timezone lines don’t change, they are well known. If they Nuvi is set to Pacific time and you cross into Mountain time, it should ask if you want to change or leave the time in Pacific. Real simple. So instead I was forced to change it myself. Easy? No again. You have to go about 4 screens deep and then in Locale you have to do a “Change All” option. I searched for a way just to change the time and timezone information, but that seems to be the only way. You then go through about 6 or 7 screens asking about what language etc, before you get to the timezone and time information. What a pain.

Navigation Issues

Now let’s talk about actual navigation.

Problem number one. When navigating, it often won’t tell you by voice which direction the next turn is until you are right at the turn. This is very bad in busy city traffic. It will say “turn onto X street in 1 mile” or whatever, but won’t say which direction so you can plan to be in the proper lane. Looking at the map can help but not always. Sometimes the turn is off screen and you still don’t know. Then when you’re right at the turn it often does tell you which direction, but that can be too late. This fumble got me messed up a number of times. (I need to say that I ride around with the GPS inside my tank bag on my motorcycle and the sound is coming into my helmet, so I rely heavily on the voice prompts as I can’t be looking down at a GPS every few seconds while riding)

Another user of the Nuvi told me that they only use the Turn-by-turn screen when navigating as it gives better information. I agree with this, but then you loose information about what’s around you on the map too.

Problem number two. When multiple turns happen right on top of each other, the Nuvi wasn’t often able to keep up. On one particular freeway on-ramp there was a two way split, then another, then another. Well I followed the first direction, but the next had to guess as I was getting no help from the Nuvi, and low and behold I guessed wrong… it then goes into its “Recalculating” mode and I get no help at all for 15 seconds while a third split comes up. Gee, glad you were there for me Nuvi. Bleh!

Problem number three. You can only have one waypoint. ONE WAYPOINT? What is this 1990 shit? How freaking hard would it be to allow multiple waypoints and allow you to sort or rearrange them? Not very!! Opps… calm… serenity now, SERENITY NOW!

Problem number four. You can’t cancel a waypoint or a destination singly, you cancel both and have to recreate. This was often an issue because even though I reached the waypoint successfully, the Nuvi didn’t think I had. So I’m traveling on to my destination and it’s trying to get me back to the waypoint. So I had to stop the whole route and re-enter the destination again.

Problem number five. You can’t detour around things for shit. There is a nice little “Detour” button you can push, but IT decides where to detour you to or how to detour. The other GPS systems I’ve used allowed you to choose the street on the route list you wanted to detour around. Easy to do again, but a huge oversight by Garmin. I never used this “feature” after the first few problems with it and instead planned my own detours and ignored the Nuvi’s directions until it finally synced up with my new route.

Minor Annoyances

There is a standard feature of being able to look up a business by name that works as advertised, but there should definitely be a “recent searches” function to this also. I got really tired of typing the same thing over and over as I tried to find a Starbucks to do my next internet access from.

When searching for a business you can choose some “Near…” options such as “Near where I am” or “Near my current route”, etc. However, I found that “Near where I am” produced at least predictable results, while the “Near my current route” would often not find any results when I knew they were there from a previous search. If you can’t trust it, you won’t use it.

The next annoyance was when I wanted to navigate to a city. Easy enough to choose city from the menu and type out the city name. The annoying part was that the sort of those cities was all messed up. I would think that it would sort the cities from closest to farthest. So when I search for Portland and am in Boston, Portland ME would be right at the top. But NOOOO, It lists like 15 other Portlands, all of them thousands of miles away and you have to scroll down and down and down to find the city that you want. Almost invariably the city closest to me was near but not at the bottom of the list. This annoyance one time really messed up a whole day for me. In California I was attempting to get to Hayward. So I enter Hayward, find it among all the other crap listings of Hayward it’s showing and I’m off… but soon I’m way off the track I think I should be on. Unknown to me at that point is that there are two Hayward CA locations that are only like 100 miles apart maybe. I mistakenly chose the wrong one because the one I wanted and was closest of course was down two more screen. So I wasted many hours and many miles heading in the wrong direction because I trusted the damn Nuvi.

Another handy feature ruined by lack of a simple fix is the “Recently found.” It keeps a list of all your recent searches. Great!! However when you’re doing a lot of searches it quickly gets full of crap and would be nice to prune it down. You can’t! You can either clear all, or leave them all. Stupid.

On the main map it shows you the time to your destination, but not to your waypoint. Why not?

No speeding indicator. This small little feature is a godsend on my other GPS. Whenever I go over the known speed limit for a road, I get a nice little double beep. Just a quiet reminder that I’m now speeding. The speed shown on the screen also turns red, just in case you didn’t hear the beep. Well no such help on the Nuvi. If you didn’t see the posted sign on the road back there, you are going to have to take your chances.

The Straw that broke the Camels back

The unit froze up a number of times. Probably 15 times over the 2 months. I’d be navigating along (and not currently listening to music) just enjoying the silence. When I get to my exit or near it, I start wondering why I’m not getting prompted for turns. Well the damn Nuvi has frozen up and I’m on my own now!! It takes around 4 minutes or so for the Nuvi to reboot when you hold down the power key and get back to a point where it can help you out again. So if you were in a particularly hairy part of the navigation, you’re pretty much F’ed. And not only that, but a couple of times the power cord got wiggled out and the Nuvi was running on battery for hours. Well when it ran out, instead of letting me know in some way that it was low, it just shuts off. I go to turn it back on, and get nothing. Have to stop and check the connections, then it finally comes back on.

That’s it!!!! I’m through with you Garmin Nuvi 680. I’ve had enough. Out! Out of my house (or car or motorcycle)! Luckily I bought it from Costco and as long as it’s within 90 days I can return it. Yay Costco!!

There are more smaller items that also annoyed, but I’ve listed the biggest flaws. And to be fair there were some good features too, but were overshadowed by the bad. My recommendation would be to evaluate if any of those issues I discussed bother you, and make your own decision. But this model was not a good fit for me.

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Tags: Electronics, Travel

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