Garmin nuvi 1690 4.3 Inch Portable Bluetooth Navigator with nuLink Services

Garmin nuvi 1690 4.3 Inch Portable Bluetooth Navigator with nuLink Services
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I've had this unit for a couple of months and generally like it compared to my older 760 (with the now defunct MSN traffic service). I like the unit enough I'm going to buy another one for our other car (to replace a 7xx in it), please take my negative comments below in that light.

Likes:
- Most all good aspects of the Nuvi family are in this unit, overall I really like Garmin (I use their auto, pro aviation, consumer aviation, and boating GPS's) and the Nuvi line has pretty good sw and a clear voice. Its dumbed down for 'consumer' use and not very configurable, but that makes it easy for anyone to use out of the box.

- The 'eco routing' thing is actually pretty cool, I tell it the amount (gals, $$$, miles) at each fillup and it estimates the cost of each trip when you shut the car off. It does make you think ("wow, going to costco to pick up milk just cost me 0.75 round trip"). It would be nice if it logged the details of the fillup data in a csv file so I wouldn't have to keep a separate fuel log as I do now.

- Unlike older Nuvi's you can actually display several items down the right side of the map and customize what each one shows; it is finally possible to directly have ETE displayed ("how long to get there") rather than always having to figure out in your head current time - ETA like the 7xx series.

- The occasional ads are very unobtrusive (but sadly totally useless, I wish they had some real advertisers onboard with this) and I haven't been annoyed by them yet (normally I hate ads). If they actually had coupons for places nearby (esp food) I would likely actually use them.

Now the issues, all of these are infrastructure and software and if the past is any guide Garmin will hopefully address these issues while this is still a 'current' product.

- The unit got into a mode recently where any search involving an address would cause it to hang dead. No auto-reboot, just hang with the last thing on the screen stuck there. It seemed to be some problem looking up addresses that caused this, if I use google local and hit 'go' or if I tried to enter an address when I chose the 'city' it would just get stuck forever. It would reboot (hold down power button style) and work fine until the next search. After a couple of days I reloaded the same (latest) firmware to the unit and that cleared the problem up.

- When dealing with busy traffic (snow storm or rush hour here in MN) the unit frequently freezes then reboots. It takes about 2 minutes for it to come back up and display the map and acquire enough traffic enough to make a route. Not horrible but a bit annoying if its leading you through some back street route (because the freeway is a parking lot in a snow storm say) and you lose guidance and only have a general idea where you are.

- The traffic routing is something of a work in progress. Its much more useful and sensitive than the routing from the MSN or FM traffic sources alone but it frequently gets the idea that smaller local streets are 'yellow' or 'red' and tries to send you on wacky tiny back streets to avoid them. The main county road going by my house (2 lanes each direction, 45 MPH) is almost always listed as yellow or red (and the routing algorithm tries to avoid it desperately) but it has the usual normal traffic running at 45-50mph between (far apart) lights.
A major n/s road (same class as the county road) which actually does get very clogged up with traffic at rush hour trying to avoid a parking lot on the parallel freeway never shows that it has any traffic even though you might end up stuck for 20 minutes going 1/2 a mile at rush hour.
The idea of using people with gps's to be the traffic sensors is great but I think their backend software needs a *lot* of work before its trustable.

Sadly UI wise its a real pain to turn off traffic based routing so when you're on the road and it gives you a bogus route (and you know it) you can't easily say 'reroute w/o traffic input' (or better, 'reroute w/o some traffic input' where some is determined by the user somehow).

- The auto zooming feature is a little too enthusiastic for my taste but I generally want it on anyway. Sometimes I really do not want it on, I just want the zoom level pinned. There is no way to turn it off, you're stuck watching the thing throb in and out continuously with no option. The marketing guys who told engineering to 'remove all options because they're confusing' went too far on this one.

- The shared location service (ciao) is pretty flakey. In theory it should update garmin(ciao) then any social networking site you have attached to them (they only support gypsii right now) every 5 minutes or so. It works about half the time, the past couple of days it didn't update gypsii until I rebooted the unit and went to the 'ciao' menu and viewed my friends. Maybe this is some way to save on data usage, but it makes it pretty much useless for someone (say your spouse) to keep tabs on where you are while running errands or whatever (you can turn it off of course if you want -- that works fine).

- The MSN news and stocks pages were kind of nice when you're stuck someplace waiting and have nothing else at hand. They also entertain pax on long trips, I miss them.

- You should be able to get current WX radar overlaid on the map like on the 7xx line, animated and up to date. This is about the best info you can have when out cycling and trying to avoid bad wx.

- For some reason if you attach external power via the only 'simple' connector on the unit (the mini-usb connector) it thinks there's a PC attached and goes into PC file sharing mode. So you can't really power the thing from an external battery (say on a bike so your spouse can keep track of your progress). You get whatever time you have on the internal battery then you're done.

- The could spend another 0.04 and get a slightly faster CPU along with a little work on the firmware and make it so typing on the on screen keyboard doesn't have a 1-2 second lag when the unit is otherwise busy (which is usually). Typing on the thing is an exercise in frustration and danger (if you're driving) because you have to stare at the key and wait 0-2 seconds for it to 'light up' before typing the next character. Not that I would ever type on the thing while acting as the vehicle driver of course.