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Garmin Nuvi 1690 4.3" Sat Nav with Full Europe Maps, Live Services and Bluetooth

by Garmin
3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)

Available from these sellers.


  • Street-level mapping for UK&ROI, Western & Eastern Europe (42 countries) with 60-Day nüMaps™ Guarantee
  • 1 Year free subscription to the Garmin nüLink! ™ real-time services
  • Premium traffic as part of 1 year free nüLink!™ Services (optional monthly subscription thereafter)
  • Services include: Fuel Prices, Hot Traffic, Google Local Search, Ciao™ Friend Finder (17 countries)
  • 4.3 inch wide touchscreen display, sleek, ultra-slim design that fits easily in your pocket.
See more product details
There is a newer model of this item:
Garmin NuLink! 2390 4.3" Sat Nav with Full Europe Maps (44 Countries) and Live Services Garmin NuLink! 2390 4.3" Sat Nav with Full Europe Maps (44 Countries) and Live Services 3.3 out of 5 stars (28)
£182.00
In stock.

Travelling to France? New 2012 legislation for French safety cameras. Learn more on the Garmin website (external link)


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Product details

  • Product Dimensions: 1.6 x 13.7 x 8.6 cm ; 222 g
  • Boxed-product Weight: 1.4 Kg
  • Batteries 1 Lithium ion batteries required.
  • Item model number: 010-00822-10
  • ASIN: B002NPC0P8
  • Date first available at Amazon.co.uk: 1 Sep 2009
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 16,017 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)

Product Description

Manufacturer's Description

The nüvi® 1690 sat nav is the new online social navigator that gives you real-time information on the go. It comes with a range of nüLink!™ services including instant traffic updates so you can avoid the queues, advanced speed cameras, up-to-date fuel prices, Google™ Local Search and Pan-European roaming*. If you want to keep in touch with friends, nüvi 1690 offers social networking and interactive navigation with Ciao! Friend Finder. And you can stay connected with instant business and phone listings too.

Includes Google Search

Includes Google Search

nüLink! Services

Hot Traffic Alerts: Instant traffic updates so you can avoid the queues.

Google™ Local Search: Need an address? Find it on Google and navigate to it.

Ciao!™ Friend Finder: Track your friends and navigate to them with social navigation.

Fuel Prices: Accurate, comprehensive fuel prices you can rely on to save fuel costs.

International Telephone Directory: Online telephone directory for addresses and numbers when you need them.
Includes Friend Finder

Includes Friend Finder

Advanced Speed Cameras: Speed cameras are continually updated so there are no surprises on route.

Weather Forecast: Always know the weather along your route and elsewhere.

Flight Status: Get up-to-the minute arrival and departure information whilst on route.

Currency Exchange: Keep up to date with current exchange rates while travelling abroad.

Send to GPS: Plan your journey remotely and "send" it to your sat nav.

Other nüvi 1690 features

nüvi 1690 offers everything you'd expect and more from a premium Garmin sat nav. It is ultra-slim but still has full European mapping. It announces the names of streets before you turn so you can be confident you're going the right way. It has GPS HotFix™ so it finds satellites quickly - and you can start driving without waiting for your sat nav to catch up.

Great on the go - driving, walking or on public transport

Use the nüvi 1690 to its full potential by downloading cityXplorer™ via www.Garmin.co.uk/cityXplorer to navigate like a local. The enhanced pedestrian mode gives you directions for walking including footpaths and shortcuts through parks - places you wouldn't be accessing while in your car. It also tells you where to catch trains, buses and tubes (dependent on the city), and how long it will take to reach your destination. cityXplorer even has public transport timetables to ensure you arrive at the station on time and help avoid long waits (dependent on the city).

To make the most of your Garmin sat nav when exploring a new city, whether on a day trip, a holiday or for business, you can also add an optional AA City Guide. It tells you everything you need to know about your chosen city from attractions and places to eat, hotels and shops.

Advanced speed cameras

Advanced speed cameras

Lane Assist helps you get into the correct lane in plenty of time which is particularly useful near busy junctions. It illustrates the lanes in the top left-hand corner of the main map screen, with the distance to the exit and which lanes to take. Junction View gives you an accurate preview of the road signs up ahead on the sat nav screen together with an illustration of any lane changes required.

Make hands free phone calls

Keep your eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel with nüvi 1690's integrated Bluetooth® wireless technology, microphone and speaker. Just pair with your compatible mobile phone and talk hands-free through the nüvi. You can also search for a place of interest on your Garmin nüvi (such as a hotel or restaurant) and call it simply by pressing the telephone icon on your sat nav's screen. It means you can stow your phone in your glovebox, bag or pocket and let your sat nav do the work. To see if your phone is compatible, go to www.garmin.com/bluetooth/phones.jsp

Go Green and save fuel

The ecoRoute™ fuel-saver feature enables you to choose a fuel-efficient route which could save you fuel and money. Simply choose the "less fuel" option and nüvi 1690 will calculate the route which will use the least fuel. You can also see the estimated cost of your journey as you plan it and get scored for your driving performance with the Driving Challenge - good for identifying areas for improvement.

Park Position Recall

Your nüvi 1690 will remember where you've parked and direct you back there.

Where am I? safety feature

The Where am I? safety feature can be very helpful if you break down or need a certain service urgently. Just tap the car icon on your map screen for your exact coordinates, contact details for vehicle recovery services and directions to hospitals, police and petrol stations.

Find the cheapest fuel

Find the cheapest fuel

Extras for your Garmin

There are lots of extras you can add to your Garmin sat nav. These include travel guides such as AA Days Out, The Good Pub Guide, historical audio tours and more. You can also have some fun by adding celebrity voices. If you're a music fan you may want to download the locations festivals in the UK, or if you want to go on a shopping trip the locations of shopping centres. See www.garmin.co.uk/garminextras for more information.

*Services available in 15 European countries, services vary between countries. Please see www.garmin.com/nulink! for details.

nuLink! countries include: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. The access to roaming depends on the service - speed cameras and telephone directory access will be limited to the region selected.

Box Contains

  • Garmin nuvi 1690T satellite navigation system
  • Free 1 year data subscription to Garmin nuLink! Services
  • Preloaded City Navigator NT for Europe
  • Mount
  • Vehicle power cable
  • USB cable
  • Dashboard disc
  • Quick Start manual


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
220 of 221 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Garmin's debutante 13 Dec 2009
By Paul Madge HALL OF FAME TOP 10 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
I bought this for my girlfriend who drives from West Sussex to Hemel Hempstead most days as an early Christmas present. I was slightly apprehensive as this satnav marks Garmin's first excursion into live update services - an area that Tom Tom have been in for some time. However, I need not have worried the live traffic and speedcam updates are excellent and save having to connect the satnav to the PC, and, obviously the updates take place in close to "real time" too. Traffic updates are swift but not instant. The unit also displays local speed limits and your current speed with the latter figure appearing in red if you are overspeed.

The 1690 satnav looks like a premium unit, although, the piano black surround to the screen is a magnet for fingerprints. The mounting hardware is good quality too with the electrical connection being made to the cradle rather than satnav itself, which, in my experience, is much easier to manage. Also, because the traffic update is received by the satnav unit rather than the usual "in line" traffic receiver the connection cable is slimmer and easier to store.

The 4.3 inch screen, software and ergonomics are up to Garmin's usual high standard, although, sometimes you still "discover" features that do not appear in the quick start guide or on-line PDF manual. Mapping appears good and you have up unitil 60 days after purchase to download an updated version. The only slight issue being sometimes the refresh can be a bit slow as can the switch off process - but these are marginal issues. I can recommend purchasing the Garmin dashtop friction mount to use with this unit.

The range of functions beside traffic etc. is amazing - live weather updates, flight arrivals, Google search etc. take this satnav into a new league. For the technically minded this unit uses "Edge" technology akin to that used by Blackberry's etc.

The unit comes with a "free" one year subscription to Garmin Live Services (in the US it is two years free) A matter of curiosity to me was the cost of future years Garmin Live subscriptions and I am told it is going to be £69.99. Although it sounds steep, given that the Garmin Cyclops Speed Camera database subscription is around £30 alone, the cost of Live Services isn't too bad if you are someone who drives a lot at peak times.

In summary, a landmark product for Garmin which delivers what it says it will - I suspect there will be further developments soon in Live Services. Recommended.
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318 of 322 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not great 7 Jan 2010
By TheProf TOP 1000 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Amazon Verified Purchase
CAPSULE REVIEW: Read this for the quick low-down:-
+s: Good, large and clear display/screen; reception of traffic info is now more reliable due to nu-link service using mobile network instead of FM radio signals; useful new speed limit information; Google local search useful; simple, well-proven interface; generally good routing; Excellent form factor - feels good in the hand.
-s: traffic info now classed as a nu-link subscription service (will cost approx. £70 per year after first 12 months); limited nu-link services; no MP3 playback; no FM transmitter to connect to car stereo; still some screen lag/slow redraw issues; traffic service is still Traffic Master and no equivalent to TomTom HD traffic or IQ routes; some users report reliability issues.

INTRO: Garmin v TomTom
What are my Garmin 'credentials'? I've used their hiking units and avaiation units, and have 'graduated' from i3, to 200, 250, 265 and now Nuvi 1690 car units. I'm not a die-hard fan and open-minded about the whole Garmin v TomTom issue. Garmin have a long history in the satnav business, being well known for their excellent hiking, aviation and marine GPS products. When it comes to in-car sat navs they have become a bit of a niche choice in the UK and Europe, lagging behind TomTom when it comes to sales. This is not necessarily justified, since Garmin's experience in GPS design has meant that over the years they have released some excellent models (255W for example).

ENTER THE 1690
The 1690 is the latest model in the Garmin UK line-up, but despite it's fairly hefty current price, it does lack some 'top of the line' features that other Garmin in-car models possess. For example, while it has a generally excellent junction view feature, it lacks the 3D building feature present on other high-end Garmin units. It also lacks voice command control (can be useful and is safer in the long run) and an MP3 player. The latter might appear gimmicky, but bear in mind that some of the interesting third party products that offer guided tours and itineraries rely on this MP3 feature to provide audio commentary, so you would get text only with the 1690 - a shame. It is also odd that in a unit that costs more than the lower-spec 1490 model, you get a SMALLER screen that appears to be less bright and clear. Odd.

NU-LINK - the 1690 is a 'connected' Sat Nav
So what is new about the 1690? Well, it features Garmin's new Nu-Link 'connected technology'. Inside the unit is the guts of a mobile phone, meaning that it can connect to various mobile services and thus provide real time information of various sorts via the mobile connection. One major gripe about this is that over here in Europe, we only get 12 months of Nu-Link free of charge (in the US they get 2 years !). So after 12 months it would appear that all Nu-Link services will stop working on the 1690 unless you pay to subscribe to them (I believe about £70 per year in the UK - this is currently £10 cheaper than the TomTom Live service annual subscription in the UK - worth noting !). Now while this might seem a minor headache, bear in mind that it looks like Garmin class the traffic info on this device as a Nu-Link feature, so it will probably stop working unless you keep up the subscription. So what do we get in the UK with Nu-Link. Well disappointingly we don't get a useful feature that our US cousins get - we do not get live entertainment info - so in the US you can look up cinema times and what movies are showing, as well as local concerts and theatre listings. Not so, in the UK. We do get 'live' weather info for our current destination - I have found on the whole it isn't as accurate as the Met Office web site though. We get updated petrol prices - these seem pretty accurate and useful. We get the ability to do a Google local search - useful and this provides many more points of interest than any in-built database would. We also get the 'Ciao' friend finder - I found this to be useless - in theory you can see where your friends are and they can see where you are - great, except that everyone has to either have a Garmin 1690 or a nuviphone for this to work...

LIVE TRAFFIC
What is the traffic info like? Well it does seem better than the FM version featured on previous models - at least you don't need a separate antenna/cable for it to work, as it gets the info via the mobile cnnection. Trouble is, it is the same TrafficMaster traffic as featured on other Garmins. It is less sophisticated than HD traffic on TomTom, but of course many TT users report that HD traffic is pretty useless at present in the UK anyway. So the Garmin traffi, relying on TM as the provider, only features traffic info for major roads - motorways and A roads essentially. I found it to be OK - the unit will automatically re-route you around traffic if you want it to, but sometimes you will find it doing this even though the traffic jam it THINKS is present has actually disappeared. Still, it's better than nothing, and you are more likely to retain traffic info with this new system of it being delievered over the mobile network connection - before, with FM radio based traffic, there were spots in the UK with poor reception - this should now be less of an issue.

SPEED CAMERAS
The Nu-Link technology is also used to deliver up-to-date speed camera information, which is apparently updated via the mobile technology rather than the old way of connecting your unit to a PC via USB - that certainly is handy. Shame that you get no info about when the data is updated though.

BASIC NAVIGATION
Basic navigation features are similar to most previous Garmin units, and are generally sound. There is no equivalent to TomTom IQ routes though, so some routing choices can be odd at times, though for much of the time the Navteq sourced maps seem to be OK. The unit I received from Amazon had the latest 2010 maps on it and they seem generally OK but I am guessing they were actually put together early 2009 judging by what is still missing from them. One feature which is now much better implemented is the speed limit info - most roads now display this (though not always correctly) and the 1690 has the new feature of showing your existing MPH in red if you are going over the speed limit for the current road - nice. This unit shares one feature with other high-end units - you can plan multi-point routes on the unit, which is good, and missing from some lower-line Nuvis such as the 25x and 26x series. It is a real pain to plan them, though, on screen, as I find it quite hard to get the touch-screen to know exactly which road, junction etc you are pointing at/pressing at. You can use Google Maps to send locations to the unit, but sadly, it looks like you can't use GM to send a route. You can, however, use the optional (extra) Mapsource Garmin software to create and send routes to the unit via USB.

A FEW QUIBBLES - The speaker and screen lag
I must mention the speaker on this unit - it is quite loud but could be clearer - it rattles a bit and doesn't give the impression of a high quality component - a shame on a unit at this price point - there is no option to route the voice via your in-car stereo since there is no FM transmitter built into this unit (another omission that is present on previous high end units in the 7xx and 8xx series). Voices are generally clear although as usual, Text to Speech (TTS) voices used when you want the unit to read out street names are recorded in a lower quality than non-TTS voices, and you can hear the difference. There are fewer 'novelty' voices for Garmin units compared to TomTom but Garmin have just released a free voice recorder application for download from their web site that enables you to record your own non-TTS voices to put on your unit - so you can create a voice with your partner, kids, dog(?!) etc! Screen refresh seems relatively fast but there are some signs that this unit could have done with a faster processor - when you really push it to the max the on-screen position of your vehicle does lag behind the actual position a little bit, even when the on-screen detail is not set to max - disappointing.

SUCTION MOUNT
The supplied suction mount does the job, and this is a powered mount system so power is delivered from your car lighter socket via a cable direct to the mount, rather than direct to the unit - a more convenient solution than previous models although it makes it more fiddly to use a non-suction based friction mount (I still use the latter though).

NO PRINTED MANUAL...AGAIN
As usual, Garmin skimps and doesn't provide a paper manual, instead relying on a PDF - at this price this is a bit of a cheek, but it is becoming the norm in consumer electronics.

STABILITY ISSUES & SOFTWARE GLITCHES - have more or less been nailed in the latest firmware from Garmin so ensure you register your device on Garmin's web site and update the device software - this should mean that some previous reports of re-boots and other odd behaviour will not affect your unit (fingers crossed).

Regarding glitches - I have sometimes had my unit behave strangeely - for example, it sometimes displays wildly inaccurate speeds or the current speed display freezes for up to 5 minutes. I have also experienced one or two lock-ups requiring a re-boot.

QUALITY CONTROL ISSUES? - there have been some internet forum posts, mostly, but not exclusively, by US owners, indictaing that at least some batches of 1690s have been faulty, displaying screen flicker, for example, or with faulty on/off switches. Watch out for these issues and if you discover them make sure you return to the place you bought the unit from for a swap or refund, ideally within 28 days, the period when consumer law in the UK protects you the most. Read more ›
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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars What Problems? 25 Jun 2010
Bought this to replace a TomTom OneXL but was a little apprehensive because of some of the comments on Amazon and elsewhere. Then again most of the alternatives I was considering had equally worrying comments and I wanted the sort of features that the Garmin nuvi 1690 offered. I needn't have worried because the Garmin hasn't given me a moments trouble and I am very happy with it and all the features work very well.
I find the Garmin much better to use than the TomTom and certainly the Garmin website is way better but then it didn't have much to beat, in my view. That's not to say that the nuvi is perfect because there are a few minor failings - I have made a few journeys where the nuvi occasionally told me that I am in a national speed limit area, when the permanent marker posts at roadside clearly showed it was 40 mph and that suggests the data isn't as always up to date - but the important things are spot on.
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