This car was the last good Altima built.  It features standard options with leather, decent performance for a car of its class, and is very reliable.  The car has been pushed hard, and yet never showed any problems.  Acceleration from 0-60 is between 9-10 seconds, which was okay for its time.  The handling  and breaking is impressive for a FWD sedan in its class.  The design still holds well for an 8-year-old car.  The new Altimas improved in designs and performance, but Nissan has degraded the materials they use to a subpar level.  There have also bee reliability issues with the newer models.  This is unfortunate for a company that use to build such great vehicles.  Overall, this is a great car and I hope Nissan can recover from its recent mistakes.

The car made the worst noises ever... try driving into a campground at 12am with skweeky everything, waking up all the neighbors.  Additionally, the gas milage sucked.

Very reliable, but only good when the kids are young! Not enough room now that they are getting older!

I think I broke facebook.  I just typed a nice review and it deleted it.  I will type it again anyway.  
This is Dusty, my first car.  While I don't have much comparsion, just my 2003 Nissan Sentra, I really loved this car.  I had no choice on her, my parents signed a lease, brought her home and handed me a bill.  They wanted a new car because they wanted something that would start every day and that wouldn't cost me a ton in constant repairs.  It fulfilled that requirement.  In fact, all I did besides oil changes was a brake replacement (and since I was a new driver, it was probably just me) and fixing a flat or two (once again probably my new driver-ness and the amount of miles I put on the car).  Compared to the Sentra, there are lots of nice asethic things I didn't realize how much I appreciated until I didn't have them anymore- I loved having cupholders in the middle (they didn't block the air/radio/console controls), I liked that the glove box locked (and didn't open with the valet key), and the fact that the radio had a bar that showed where the volume was at.

Fast car, if only it was rear wheel drive.