Our Garmin Nuvi 680 Review

Jump To Review Contents:

1. Top of page
2. Video of usage
3. MSN Direct Traffic integration
4. MSN Direct Weather integration
5. MSN Direct Gas Station price integration
6. Features Menu
7. Mp3 Player & Sound
8. BlueTooth & Hands Free Phone
9. Language Guide & Voice Translation
10. Travel Guide & Points of interest
11. Accessories
12. Best Prices & Cheapest Discounts with Amazon.com
13. Finding hot deals, cheap sales & lowest prices with Ebay.com
14. Read or leave your own – site visitor reviews and comments
15. way to many features to list….

The Nuvi 680 from Garmin – Driving has evolved and become fun!
The Garmin Nuvi 680 gps unit builds upon the massively successful and popular features that made its little brother, the nuvi 660, rise quickly to the best selling electronic gadget of 2006 and win various consumer electronic awards.

Retaining all the features that made the 660 the king of the hill before it, such as the ultra bright 4.3′ wide screen display, incredibly efficient bluetooth calling, and real time traffic conditions brought seamlessly into the navigation data, the garmin nuvi 680 receiver has a bunch of new tricks up its sleeve that have it already becoming the must have gps unit for anyone looking to jump into the market.

Most prominent of the new additions to its predecessor, is the integration and utility of MSN direct service built incredibly efficient into the experience. MSN Direct functionality brings the experience to new levels, with real up to the minute data displayed for you exact geographical location as determined by the super accurate tracking systems. Such features as gas prices, weather conditions, up to the second traffic conditions and local movie and entertainment information for areas right around your general area.

Larry’s Video of the Nuvi GPS

Unable to find or create a sample garmin nuvi 680 video, I figured this movie clip of Larry playing with his new nuvi 660 unit might be usefull to some visitors looking for a visual review representation of the little brother of the unit. Just imagine the 660 feature here all beefed up and with seamless local data integration, buffed up features, and some new toys not shown on the video clip to get an idea of what your potential new nuvi 680 gps might be like:

Nuvi 680 & MSN Direct Traffic

A simply tap on the MSN butterfly and then choosing traffic will open your eyes to the next wave of GPS goodies. The ability to integrate and access real time traffic data and display it easily into your route and maps to help you navigate around and through bad traffic jams, stoppages, blockage and accidents is a huge selling factor for people on the run. Using MSN direct’s sources for traffic data helps the nuvi 680 to give a wider array of information along your route to spot potential problems long before you come across them.

Nuvi 680 & MSN Direct Weather

Navigating to the weather tab using the touchscreen brings up the up-to-minute weather conditions and forecast outlook for your general area or route, with the ability to search any other location to help you maintain information on multiple locaties. Generally I found this feature to be quite accurate and useful, knowing well in advance how the weather conditions were changing at both my point of departure and arrival as I traveled my route.

Nuvi 680 & MSN Direct Gas Prices

Navigating and touching the Gas Prices icon on your touch screen, brings up a comparitive list of all the gas stations in your general radius, and allows you to compare prices at all stations, see how far each price from your current location, and allows you to choose a station which will bring up an alternate route to help you travel to the station while maintaining your original course of travel.

Something imperfect I noticed here, was that not every single gas stations such as the lesser known companies and family owned operations would pop up, but in defense of the versatility of the unit, simply searching through the POI database as vigorously supplied by garmin’s nuvi units, will allow you to search through near millons of gas stations based upon location and will help you find near every available store in my experience.

Whats old is new again:

All the features that have helped to build the garmin nuvi gps series to such incredible prestige and popularity are back and better then ever with the gamin 680 nuvi.

Mp3 Player

The MP3 player is a favorite of many, and is accessed by touching the icon from travel kit area or the music note in map views. One thing to note if you are excited about this feature, is that you will probably want to get an SD memory card to allow you hold potentially 100’s-1000’s of songs at a time, a 1GB stick will generally cost you in the $30 mark and will hold a couple hundred songs in my experience.

Bluetooth, Hands Free Calling & FM transmittor

Keeping up to date with the latest technologies, the garmin nuvi 680’s bluetooth functionality was a major selling point for me. All you have to do is pair ift with abluetooth eneable phone or device and the nuvi will work to configure the devices together. You can quickly turn the nuuvi 680 into a hands free phone/speakerphone to recieve and place phone calls with the touch screen, find points of interest or phone numbers through the extensive travel,savers and POI database’s and dial straight from your device.

The microphone has a great reception quality compared to even the latest cell phones, and has a strong signal range of about a 10 meter radious in my experience.

New to the 680, you can use your garmin 680 gps integrated as an FM transmittor with the bluetooth connection, giving you the ability to use your car’s full stereo system setup to relay the sounds. This is the strongest integration of bluetooth technology I have seen or heard of on a gps system, and absolutely love it due to me being a fairly reckless and dangerous driving when my cell phone rings an important car while I was srtuglling to find street names and locations i9n traffic

Language Guide, Translation and text to speech

The language guide is a strong feature for people dealing with foreign languages and for many other purposes (my daughter cheated on a school assignment admitedly using the spanish to english translator!! )

All the common languages are available, with mutual translation between all of them and prounciation included, which I find incredibly useful in many situations… as even though I can spell the word in a new tongue, I sometimes end up saying something completely off base when try to prounonce some funny looking words!

Travel Guide – Points of interest (POI)

Another extensive and useful database, the nuvi’s travel guide system initial or upgraded travel packs (which can also be upgraded at a slight price for more coverage) contain just about any local and common entertainment, restaurant or popular destinations you may wish to find in you general area. Find certain type of restaurants, make a reservation by tapping the screen and dialing (handsfree with bluetooth integration) and get the fastest route and easiest turn by turn steps to find it all at once.

The nuvi 680 ships with a pretty vast travel guide database, with most restaurants, hotels, tourist attractions and common destinations being preloaded for more travelled destinations, but if you want absolute coverage of a less comonly travelled destination, you may want to look into getting a travel guide upgrade for that particular region/city.

Accesory addons – Accessories for garmin nuvi 680

The garmin nuvi’s 680 accesory list is long and varied thanks to the SD memory card and other expansion capabilities built into garmin gps units. Additional and aftermarket performance updates, language guides, extensive city and region coverage updates and more are commonly available for purchase quite cheap in SD memory card format.

One of the more common accessories for the nuvi 680 gps reciever are mounts different then the one that ships with the product when you buy it. In many places you aren’t allowed to have the standard dash mounts, and garmin and other dealers have with the right accessories to help you find your favorible nuvi 680 mount position and type to ensure you can place your new favorite toy in the most ideal viewing location.

Everything to XM satelite radio upgrades to leather carrying cases can be found in such places as cool and useful accessories for your garmin 680 gps unit, and with some of the lowest prices on amazon and cheapest discounts on ebay, you really can pimp out this hot gadget to the max!

Finding Cheap and best prices on Nuvi 680 with Amazon.com

If you want to buy garmin’s nuvi 680 gps unit, I highly recommend you check out places like amazon.com where multiple dealers are all listed in one place. Amazon is the internet’s largest retail store for a reason, they simply list the cheapest prices, best discounts and are all around the lowest price tag. Incredibly reputable and safe compared to most other places, amazon’s large size and reputation ensure you get the best deals on garmin nuvi 680 accessories, mounts and systems, and I also find it to have the best return policies, fastest shipping and generally most satisfying buying experience.

Visit Amazon.com now and read 1000+ GPS reviews, ratings and best selling lists!

Getting absolute cheapest discounts and lowest price with Ebay.com

There is no denying the fact that if you want the ABSOLUTE lowest prices and cheapest discount sales on an item, that ebay’s sheer volume and competition factors make advertisers and sellers there go insanely cheap and low on the prices. Ebay can be a bit challenging or intimidating for someone that hasn’t bought or ordered something from them before, as well as offer slighlty less security and unknown variables such as shipping time when dealing with lesser known retailers that advertise there, but generally will always net you the garmin nuvi 680 lowest and cheapest price if you do your research into whether the seller is trustworthy or not.

For people without ebay accounts or comfort and knowledge of auction service, I find that amazon.com is the truly safe bet for some great discount prices and on sale nuvi 680 items, and is completely the internet’s most trusted and reputable superstore.

Other useful features

There are quite a few other utilities and tools prepacked into the garmin nuvi 680 I find myself using quite often, and in fact I find myself running out to the car even though I am not traveling anywhere just to take advantage of some everyday utilities to help me get through chores and tasks. Currency and measurement conversions, world clock, world maps, language translators that pronounce the words to help me speak and not just write in foreign tongues, just to name a few of over two dozen utilities that me and all passengers of the vehicle just are so happy to play with during stays in the car or general tasks.

Some visitor garmin nuvi 680 reviews

Rating: Dave’s Review of nuvi 680 & 660

Visitor dave offers up his nuvi 680 experience with some comparison to the garmin 660 gps system which he also owns and now his other vehicle has equipped.

Rating: Maria’s Review of her garmin 680 gps unit

Maria sent us a very perky email and her personal garmin 680 gps feelings and review after spending a few weeks with what she calls “my new favorite toy”

Rating: Jason’s review of the superiority of the garmin nuvi 680

Jason offered up his comments in feelings from the perspective of a person employed in the development and software writing of gps receiver tracking systems

Too much to list, two little time!

In reality there is really way to much contained within the garmin nuvi’s latest models to summarize and detail each in writing (I may develop arthritis from so much writing) I think many looking to buy garmin nuvi’s 680 gps model have done their research well already to come to a such a sound choice, and hopefully my coverage of some of the new and rebuilt basics will be enough to convince you to buy it… as I know if you are like the 98% of customer whom have left a near perfect score and garmin nuvi 680 reviews at the various online retailers, you will be incredibly satisfied, and discovering and eventually finding all the powerhouse functions and treasures this unit contains within the menus, will have you continuously finding new and exciting features that you still hadn’t found after weeks of using it like a child’s new favorite Christmas present! Best wishes with your new gps unit if you do decide to indulge on this incredible gadget, you can rest assured your money was well spent, as their isn’t much in the GPS market place this year that truly rivals this units performance / price range.