Rating: ★★★★★

This is an outstanding GPS, easy to use, very portable and amazingly accurate.

There’s a lot to like about the Garmin Nuvi 670. The number of languages and voices is surprising. Pronunciation of street names in English while in France was rather funny but it was possible to switch it to French and leave English words and directions on the screen so it sounded right but I could still see what it meant in English. So for directions like “take the second exit in the roundabout” that the French voice said as “prend le deuxiem sortie au rond point” I could still understand. Some streets in Sweden the English voice didn’t even try to pronounce. It just spelled them.

The unit did take some getting used to for me. Maybe it was just me but some of the settings weren’t obvious. I read in another review about it being difficult to change the settings for bike, car, truck, pedestrian, off road, etc. That took about three presses of a button, pretty simple I think. I would hate how the Tom Tom asks every time how you want to get there. I like I can set it and forget it because it mostly stays in the car for driving around the city.

The MP3 player is terrific. It sounds alright through the built in speakers, but when you use the FM traffic antenna to play it through the car radio, the sound is superb. I had no static and no interference unlike some 3rd party FM transmitters I’ve seen for iPOD’s.

Map detail is exceptional. I was on a shuttle bus in the Charles DeGaulle airport, riding from my plane to the terminal. The “alley way” we were on inside the airport was listed and the entry doors to the airport were even on the map. It had walking pathways in a small suburb of Paris. Walkways in Genoa Italy near my hotel were listed. I never saw a single street or alley anywhere I traveled in Europe that was not listed.

The Nuvi 670 never took me a wrong direction while traveling in and around Genoa, Italy; suburbs of Paris; and Stockholm, Sweden. Chicago area is a major piece of cake. Whenever I misunderstood a direction and went the wrong way the device simply recalculated the route. Most other systems I’ve used tell you to make a U-turn and head back to the route they already made. Hertz NeverLost was the absolute worst. I was never told to make a U-turn once. It always found a new one. I made some pretty silly errors, all my fault, and it simply got me back on track. Stockholm was very challenging, not for the device, but for me. There are many bridges and multilayered areas in that city I would have had to study a map for days. I made the exact same mistake twice, taking a right exit instead of just staying to the right. When you see the paper map of this area, it’s almost impossible to not make this mistake. Tunnels, multiple ramps, and bridges all in the same area did thwart my ability to navigate. Luckily all I had to do was be a good listener and being a terrible navigator wasn’t a problem.

The traffic warning system is very unusual at best. In the US there was no problems with this. It’s like the radio or internet traffic websites but more readily available while driving. They both use the same information. In Italy, there was no traffic information. In France the service did exist, I think it’s free, but I couldn’t get it to work. Sweden wasn’t listed on the Garmin website as having a traffic information service, but there it was in Stockholm, functioning beautifully.
The safety camera warning system is also strange. France seems to have a million of these. Fixed ones were accurately advised. The system beeps to let you know you are exceeding the published speed limit for that camera. The strange part was there seemed to be a little glitch. If you are on a highway and happen hit a crossroad with a lower limit and a camera the software can’t tell you are traveling on the highway and it will beep as if you’re coming to the intersection down the slower road where the camera is.

The pros outweigh the cons for this system by far. There isn’t much that needs to be changed. All the problems were manageable.

Is it worth this much money? Absolutely, yes. I compared the Nuvi 660 to the garmin 670 gps, which is the exact same just without the European maps and the FM traffic antenna and this is still the better buy. I’ve tried to learn how to use NeverLost, and about 10 different navigation systems in rental cars. I found this much more user friendly and consistent.