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 - Good Product, Traffic Info Could Use ImprovementI like the product all around. I live in San Francisco but work on the other side of the Bay, in Hayward. The unit is able to take the traffic info and tell me if the Bay Bridge or the San Moteo bridge will be faster. That is the main reason I got the unit. The traffic info could be smarter. For one I wish I could filter out the slow traffic icons. In the Bay Area the screen is riddled with dozens and dozens of slow traffic icons, making it very difficult to see if there is more serious traffic conditions such as accidents. Another is that on the traffic screen it would be nice to be able to just touch a selected traffic icon and get the information. Instead you have to scroll through each incident which places them in order by distance from you current position, despite if it is on your route or not. Again, being in San Francisco Bay Area with the dozens and dozens of slow traffic icons, one must do much scrolling in order to get to the traffic icon they are interested in. The traffic only is monitered on main freeways and highways. The unit will direct me through downtown SF finicial district during rush hour which is a parking lot. So its good to tell me which bridge to take, but cant avoid street traffic. The directions are accurate, but you may end up in grid lock. (For SF folks: It does monitor 19th Ave traffic, but not Highway 1, aka The Great Highway). If Garmin did these improvements in a software update this unit would be awsome, especially for those who purchased the unit to monitor traffic in one of the worse traffic areas in the country. As far as the volume goes, it could be louder as many has said. I have found that the male voices are easier to hear than the female voices. The FM transmitter is basically useless in San Francisco as every FM frequency is being used here. Rating:  - It's worth the money.Its easy to use. Turn it on set your geographic location and it does the rest; mounting it on the dash was just as easy. Comes already charged up. It's loud enough that I can hear even with the radio on. If the highway/expressway is jammed it will send you down the access road or side streets. The only down side is the map has not updated within the last 6-8 months. Rating: - Garmin nuvi 660Nice GPS so far. First time I've had the traffic function, seems to work quite well. Only negative is the screen could be a little larger, height not width. Rating: - Excellent GPS with a Couple of ProblemsThis is my second Garmin GPS; I liked the first one, which I still use, but I wanted a bigger viewing screen, which this model has. Overall, it's a very good unit, as many other reviewers have described. There are a couple of features which I don't like, that prevented me from giving it 5*. Firstly, I've used it only about 15 times, & the car adapter is broken already. I know it's the adapter, & not my car's cigarette lighter, because I've tried it in two other cars with the same (not working) result. I've bought a replacement made by Gilsson ($18.95 through amazon.com, at http://www.amazon.com/StreetPilot-Vehicle-Cigarette-Lighter-Adapter/dp/B001335Y3Q/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1219416271&sr=8-5). The Gilsson adapter is better made than the adapter that comes with this GPS (heavier plastic), easier to grip, makes better contact with the power source, & costs less! And contrary to popular opinion, it still allows FM radio channelling of the spoken directions. Secondly, I like the way my older Garmin handles volume control better than this unit. On the older Garmin, there is a dial on the right side of the unit that allows the user to simply turn the volume up or down (or off). On the 660, you must either lightly click the on/off switch on the top of the unit (I can't see it from my driving position) to enter the volume control screen, or press a series of on-screen buttons. Either way, the new unit is much more inconvenient, & slower, in terms of volume adjustment. As with my other Garmin (and, I presume, other manufacturer's GPS units), if you test the Garmin's route directions in an area you're very familiar with, you'll certainly find that you already know one or more better ways to get to a destination than the GPS is recommending. The biggest improvements of this model over my older Garmin are: 1) the dashboard mount is terrific (it stays put amazingly well); 2) the screen is bigger (especially the width), making for better readability; 3) this unit allows the spoken directions to be channeled through an empty FM radio station (making bass/treble, & volume adjustments very simple, but the downside is finding an empty, static free spot on the FM band, not easy in a metropolitan area, & it's also cumbersome to change from FM to in-unit voice directions or vice versa, see above); & 4) satellite reception is vastly improved (with the older unit, I have to drive one to two miles from my house to get satellite reception; with the 660, I get satellite reception inside my garage!). Rating:  - Works Great with the 2009 DownloadI purchased 2 of this Garmin Nuvi 660, so my wife & I would have the same GPS. I downloaded the 2009 map version; believe it or not, the whole download was just over 2GB. I allowed Garmin install their downloader that somehow combined 4 of their servers. I have a cable connection for my Internet, but I just let it download and walked away from the computer. I think it took a couple of hours, I really didn't time it. However, once the program was downloaded, I tried to upload it from my regular work computer, which has partition and only about 4 GB of free space on the C drive, while I had about 15GB on my data portion of free space. It wouldn't install because it said there wasn't enough free space on my hard drive. I think the program explodes the zipped 2GB file that is downloaded from Garmin. At any rate, I used my other computer, which is not partitioned, and it installed with no problem. However, it does take a long time. I installed the 2009 version on both GPS that I purchase. The map is great; it has streets on the map in my town that is not even finished yet. BTW, when you explode the 2GB file, I know that took over 2 hours to install on the GARMIN. The 660 are a great purchase. Consumer Report rated that particular model as a Best Buy.
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