My wife and I are new to the forum and may have missed an earlier post. However, can someone explain why POIs have to be requested via a category since it is not always clear what category it might be listed under. And second, when requesting a POI, why is the first thing I have to do is name the city. Sync navigation obviously knows where I am, why can't it give me the nearest location of the POI I ask for. This is going to be the one I am looking for 9 out of 10 times. Does it really have to be so complicated or am I overlooking something?

I don't have to name the city.  The nav just searches out 10 kilometers when you say what you want.  If you say "I'm hungry" or "find a restaurant", it will ask what kind or all and it will list those in that radius.  If you ask for Walmart, as an example, it will not understand.  But if you ask for a grocery store, it will list a Walmart supercenter.  You can say "I need gas" or "find a coffee shop", but I don't think you can say "find a Starbucks".  In case you did not already know, you can push the voice button twice and skip to where you can just say navigation, then after it says other options, just say what you want.  I'm not sure why you have to do categories, but I think it would take less commands and therefore less storage space for the voice recognition program. 

Under destination there is the option for "Nearest POI", you still have to select a category(ie gas atm etc) and then it'll list the nearest POIs.  As for the sub-categories I agree that its always a challenge to figure out what "walmart" or "best buy" would fall under, and in the past I have actually gone back to my garmin nuvi to get the address from its POI listings and plug it into the nav system.  Not a clean solution but it is quicker then me trying to figure out the sub-categories.