Renting a 2010 Prius right now (Nav Questions)

To my surprise, it is not a basic Prius II. It is a III with solar roof package.

I'm trying out the nav and I liked it at first since it did a good job with voice commands and the bluetooth successfully imported my contacts from my HTC Touch Diamond.
Things I immediately noticed after that that I didn't like is that it doesn't switch to a darkened mode at night like my portable GPS. Turning on the headlights doesn't seem to change much on the nav screen display. I went into the menu and manually turned down the brightness, but it was still pretty bright with a light colored background.
Is there a night mode for it?

I turned up the nav voice to the max and I was disappointed to see that the voice is still hard to hear if you turn the stereo up loud. Seems not well thought out. Either the maximum volume for the nav voice should be louder or it should simply more aggressively mute the volume of the stereo when the nav has something to announce. It lowers the volume on the radio when the nav speaks, but doesn't lower it by a whole lot.
I thought having nav integrated with the stereo would prevent this kind of issue.
Am I missing a setting to fix this?

 

I adjusted the dimmer switch and I think it switched to night mode because it is "less" bright, but this supposed night mode still seems bright with too many very light colors used as backgrounds.

Another question. I'm trying to navigate to a POI by voice and I can't seem to choose a city by voice. All it has for finding points of interest is "near here" and "along route." Near here is too small of an area so it only finds POI very close by and you can't use "along route" because I want the new route to the POI to be the route.

For instance, how can you navigate to a shopping mall POI in a different city using only voice commands without having the street address? I want it to find the address for me.

 

Ok, I found the setting and it is now has the dark background when the lights are on.

 

It does "reduce" the volume of the audio, but it does not mute it on this car. If you have the radio at a low to medium level, that's good enough, but if you have the radio on loud, the volume after the reduction is still overpowering to the nav guidance.
It should drop the stereo audio below the level of the nav no matter if you are listening to music at a low or high volume level or just mute it 100% like it does when you make a phone call.

 

I don't see any factory USB or iPod port on this car.
Aren't the nav equipped models supposed to have this standard now?
Where would it be if it had it?

 

The car sat in the sun for a few hours and now there are some pretty loud squeaks and rattles all over the interior over every bump in the road.
I hope dealers know how to fix these if I buy one and it has the same interior squeaks as this rental.

I noticed it only has RDS text on FM stations.
The JBL stereo with the nav is pretty poor. I don't notice a huge improvement over the base stereo. Doesn't sound super clear like an upscale stereo at all. The 440W JBL in a new Corolla sounds much better.
I can't hear the rear speakers at all when the fader is set to middle balaced position. I have fade it 90% to the rear to hear the rear speakers at all. Is that normal?
Bluetooth music streaming quality is poor because I have to turn the volume near max for it to sound like it's even at a medium level, so then you hear lots of hiss and background distortion at those levels. Is that normal?

 

I already returned it. I'm thinking about buying in a few days and narrowing down whether or not to get the nav. Factory bluetooth is a must, but nav isn't.
The rental car only had an aux jack. It must not be new enough for USB.
Do the USB be equipped models have any updated features to the nav? Someone posted that a hard disk system going to eventually replace the DVD systems.

 

I have seen an "iPod" adapter accessory for the non-nav models, but I think it isn't a standard USB port, so it ONLY works with iPods and not USB flash drives or portable hard disks.
Can anyone confirm this?










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