The latest crop of automotive Garmin GPS devices integrate Microsoft's MSN Direct service which transmits data like traffic, weather, movie times, gas prices, news...etc. over FM waves. I've been using it around Seattle and it's pretty cool - for example with the traffic integration it warns me of heavy traffic ahead or an accident on the route I'm taking and asks whether I want to reroute. I've also used the gas prices feature and surprisingly the weather forecast. MSN Direct integration is only available on the higher end models from Garmin and you pay separately for the MSN Direct service.

However I feel the business model could use some tweaking as you have to pay for a more expensive hardware model to use more of the MSN Direct features even though you pay a separate fee to Microsoft for the MSN service that includes all the features. For example, Live Maps (http://maps.live.com) allows you to send a location to your GPS ("Send to GPS") but my MSN Direct enabled Nuvi 680 doesn't support this feature, labeled "Web Favorites" on Garmin's web site. I would have to buy the 780 (USD$857.13) or 880 (USD$1071.41) model to get this one feature which doesn't make sense. If I pay for a service then I expect the hardware to support it fully otherwise I am not getting all of what I paid for. I would like an update to be released for the 680 similar to how the Zune team updated the V1 Zunes with the new firmware when the V2 Zunes were released - that would make me a happy customer and Garmin fan.

Apart from that, the 680 works well and the voice navigation is well done, pronouncing street names and everything. I have found a couple of funny bugs though e.g. if you set the voice to an Australian persona, it will pronouce Washington State highways such as SR-520 as "Western Australia five hundred twenty" presumably because it sees the highway (520) in the state of Washington (WA) which for all you Australian readers will recognize as the same state abreviation for Western Australia. The local pronunciation is "five-twenty" or "state route five-twenty". Curiously other personas like the American and British voices don't have this problem which says to me that the selection of persona is also affecting local name pronunciation which it shouldn't. Similar with I-405, local pronunciation is i-four-oh-five but the Australian persona says i-four-hundred-and-five.