Garmin nüLink! 1690/1695 LIVE

I bought a NuLink 1690 back in 2010 when they were first introduced. I returned it after only a couple of weeks, mainly because of the poor cellular coverage in the areas I traveled. I liked the features when it did work though.

Garmin discontinued the product in 2015 mainly because of poor sales due to the required subscription plan. It also used the old ATT 2G cellular network, which was phased out in 2017.

Smartphone apps, which duplicate most of the NuLink features, pretty much made the product obsolete.

See this old thread

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/30931

When I was a moderator at gpsrevew, another mod got one of these but was busy with other things, so he sent it to me to play with for about a month and I wrote it up extensively on the site. Of course, that is all gone now but there's a link in speedlever's post in the POI Factory thread above. Theoretically, you should be able to find this with the wayback machine at archive.org. They have archived copies from back then, but the site is really slow and kept giving me errors, so I gave up.

Digging through some other old stuff, I found another link to the gpsreview thread. I got frustrated with archive.org, but you can try pasting this into the wayback machine yourself (it's a dead link that won't work if you just click on it)

http://forums.gpsreview.net/viewtopic.php?t=21072

Anyway, so much for ancient history. I was pretty impressed with this device while I had it (but remember, this was 2010). The "connected" search and traffic features were way ahead of the built-in functions on regular Garmin devices.

Later, Garmin introduced a smartphone app that was almost identical to the Nuvi (I wrote about this in another thread here). That app was very much like the 1695 in that it offered City Navigator maps with online search and traffic features (from google, IIRC). Of course, Garmin also discontinued that - guess they were concerned it was taking a bite out of their dedicated GPS sales...

Here's that old thread. Brings back some memories...

https://web.archive.org/web/20130704002057/http://forums.gps...

But it was a six page thread and they have only archived page one. I just can't remember the details how and when I got ahold of the 1695, but it was definitely from gatorguy. On the first page of that thread, I was mostly comparing it to my Nuvi 3790, which was Garmin's attempt to make a thin, iPhone-like device.

Anyway, the 1695 got lot of use while I had it, as I was commuting to Center City Philadelphia every day from NJ, about 55 miles each way plus side trips along the way.

I know I purchased the 1690/1695 at some point in that time frame. I did however return it for reasons that I seemingly recall being that it was a connected device. I believe they gave you a sample time frame to use it as connected before being charged. Either I wasn't impressed by it, I didn't want an additional cost incurred or I didn't trust that the service would be around for very long. I believe the 1695 was after the MSN Direct receiver cable time frame and it's demise/abandonment left uncertainty (at least with me) with these types of connected devices.

Perhaps my experiences with and return reasons were spelled out later on in that posted GPS Review topic...but it's no longer available.

Thanks for the flashback, Boyd.

I just remembered that I was a "beta tester" a number of years ago for the Dash Express, which was a connected GPS. When they sent it to me, I had high hopes for it. My "daily driver", so to speak, was the Garmin Street Pilot 2730.

I gave the Dash Express a good try in 2008, but I never trusted it enough to even use it for work. Ironically, after being a beta tester for a number of months, I received an email from them advising that the program had ended. They didn't even want the GPS returned to them. They told me I was free to keep it and do what I wanted with it, so I ended up selling it.

I even recall giving it to my wife before selling it. She made a great effort with it, but came to the same conclusion I did. We both agreed that the concept was good, but the Dash Express was not good.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/12110

https://boulter.com/blog/2008/08/02/dashing-here-and-there/

Thanks for reminding me of the Dash, I had forgotten all about that (I never saw one in person). Putting everything in perspective, in that same year (2008) the iPhone 3g was introduced and was the first smartphone with a built-in GPS (AFAIK). It was my first iPhone. Today, it has all but killed the dedicated GPS device.

This quote from that blog (is it yours?) was very interesting. The author was correct about the limitations of the Dash, but couldn't quite see beyond it. The smartphone became the "new generation of general computing devices" that integrates with the car (through CarPlay and Android Auto) and nobody seems to mind carrying it around or maintaining it.

_______

"What’s really interesting about the Dash is that it seems to be the first of new generation of general computing devices for the car. It’s not just a GPS, it’s a weather information service, a web browser and “who knows what else” in the future. The only problem with this is that it’s not really part of the car. It doesn’t integrate with the radio, the air conditioning or the car’s internal computer. It’s yet another device to maintain and worse, something I have to carry around for fear of it getting stolen."