Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a beautiful little unit - very slim, large, bright screen. The voice command system gets things right about two-thirds of the time, which means you can get going almost as quickly using voice as you can using the touchscreen. It switches between portrait and landscape effortlessly. And, having upgraded from a Nüvi 670 to this, I appreciate the new nüvi features such as displaying speed limits and cameras. Having included lifetime traffic is really handy too. The integration of traffic into routing seems smoother than prior Garmins, although I drove in "red" traffic today that was moving really well, so maybe it overstates the problem sometimes. The new "mytrends" feature, in which the unit gets used to where and how you drive, sounds nice - I haven't seen evidence of how it affects things yet. There is also a lot of new environmental and fuel economy software built in. The concepts will be familiar to people who drive hybrids - you get constant feedback, and can also access a lot of data, on whether you are doing too much stop-start driving, too many bursts of acceleration and too much rapid breaking. You get fuel economy and absolute cost estimates, all of which is handy. However, I don't like having the little "leaf" indicator taking up screen space, telling me whether I'm being naughty or nice. I wish I could remove it in the display options! A firmware patch is needed from Garmin. OK . . . now on to the PROBLEM. This thing has POPUP ADS. Yes - commercial popups, like "Crabfest at Red Lobster" and "Best Western Rewards - Get 1500 points" and "Unlimited lunch $6.90" that pop up while you are driving, and take up screen space, obscuring the damn map. I called tech support, and they said that these are not supposed to pop up while you are moving, only while you are stopped. But these came up while I was driving today. Tech support says there is NO WAY THE POPUP ADS CAN BE DISABLED. Apparently it's built into the license with Navteq and will happen whenever you are receiving traffic information, and they cannot disable it. How is this OK? They don't mention it in the product specs, or on the box. I am paying hundreds of dollars for this device, and I cannot opt-out from popup ads?$#@!% Garmin seriously needs to get a firmware patch (or a hardware patch if it's part of the traffic receiver) out to allow people to disable this. The popups don't even have an "X" in the corner for you to press to get rid of them. Having got that off my chest, I'm still happy, overall, that I bought this unit.