My old GPS was the Zumo 660, bought in 2009. Before that was the Zumo 550, bought in 2007. Last night, I bought the 590LM.
First off, the Zumo series are motorcycle GPSs from Garmin. Vibration proof, weatherproof, gasoline proof, reasonably sun proof, and bloody tough. I vibrated three Garmin Quest II GPSs to death (under warranty) on my old Suzuki Katana before I dropped serious coin on the Zumo 550, and I never looked back.
The Zumo 550 was a great GPS. Did most things well, and the bluetooth support was seriously improved over 2 years of firmware updates. Then days before a ride to San Francisco, it blew out one of its audio channels. Thus the Zumo 660 entered my life.
The Zumo 660 has some nice features over the 550, including 3D display (as opposed to looking straight down on the map), bigger screen, Lane Assist (tells you what lane to be in for an upcoming decision), and 3D Lane Assist (shows you upcoming lanes and ramps, and puts an arrow on the lane/ramp you need to take). I'm sure there were more features, but I've forgotten.
Unfortunately, the Zumo 660's bluetooth is useless. Yay, they added A2DP for stereo goodness, but broke their phone audio gateway function into oblivion, and years of firmware updates did nothing to solve it. I eventually gave up hoping, and fortunately I didn't have a job with pager duty that required me to be callable 24/7 anymore.
One thing I got into obsessively with the Zumo 660 and my rides is listening to audiobooks. At first, I tried publicly available MP3 versions of audiobooks, but their volumes were often too low, the audio hissy, etc. In anticipation of another epic ride, I wanted to sort this out. The Zumo 550 and 660 ship with an Audible audiobook reader, so I tried out a free book and was seriously impressed, despite my hatred of DRM.
One shortcoming of listening to audiobooks as MP3s is the length of the MP3. Even if the book is cut into 8 hour chunks (I love epic length 18+ hour audiobooks), missing a couple seconds of a book while concentrating on a traffic event results in minutes of rewind, just due to hitting the rewind button long enough that it doesn't think you're stepping back to a previous file. Not so with Audible; their reader's rewind button is sensible for the task.
So I eventually started buying Audible books. Their subscription service isn't cheap, and I dropped a lot of coin on books over the past 3 years or so. I have a couple dozen books, and I enjoy them so much I tend to revisit them again and again. I want my rides to rock, and sometimes the risk of discovering I HATE a book during an awesome ride really sours the ride (like Brian Herbert's scatological expansion of the Dune universe). At this point, I've listened to hundreds, if not thousands of hours of audiobooks while riding. I rarely listen to music anymore.
I strongly prefer audiobooks, especially ones I've already heard, to podcasts; listening to something that introduces a new idea or concept would take too much concentration, and I'm kinda busy. Having my audiobooks controlled from my weatherproof touchscreen GPS is awesome, because it only takes a couple of presses in the space of a second to shut off the book, should my environment recommend it.
Over the years, I bought lifetime (of the GPS) map updates for North America and all of Europe for the 660. I think I wore out about 3 motorcycle cradles due to corrosion and broken wires. I've cooked a couple GTM12 FM traffic modules, and my last one off eBay (since the GTM12 is long discontinued) turned out to be a clone and Garmin won't license new subscriptions on it.
From the timelines above, you can see I ran with the Zumo 660 for 5 years, reporting over 300,000 km. I don't normally restrain my technology purchases like that; I've been dying to see a new motorcycle GPS from Garmin for years.
Besides the bluetooth woes, there was nothing really *wrong* with my 660, except that it was just getting old. The screen is showing the wear of 300,000 km of sunlight, dust, scratches, and abuse. The CPU is ancient. Its internal flash (3.7GB) is too small to hold the entire 3D North America map set anymore. And its feature set is probably 10 generations behind Garmin's Nuvi automotive line.
So Garmin finally released the Zumo 590LM. There are some really nice new features, including
- 800x480 display, vs the old 480x272 display,
- 3D terrain view (can't wait to see that in the Alps),
- Tire pressure monitor system,
- Service history log (hmm, might be interesting),
- Smartphone Link, to access weather, traffic, traffic cameras, etc.,
- Supports controlling my iPhone/iPad music player over bluetooth,
- VIRB camera support (control the camera from the Zumo's touchscreen),
- Cradle wiring harness adds an audio in, and a USB socket to charge a smartphone on,
- Curvy Roads routing!
Audiobook player
I'm treating the lack of an audiobook player as a hurtle to overcome. Garmin says they won't add Audible back (one or both of those companies are jerks), and while the Garmin can control my iPhone's music player remotely, it can't control my iPhone's Audible app beyond pausing a handset-started reading.
Curvy Roads routing is going to be very interesting. Garmin GPSs usually offer two routing options; fastest, and shortest. Since both can be boring to a motorcyclist, finally Garmin noticed that TomTom has apparently been making a splash with their curvy road support and added it to their latest motorcycle GPSs. I can't wait to give that a try, when I've got the time to not want the fastest route. :)
I haven't even mounted the GPS on the bike yet; I've got a bunch of electrical work I want to do while integrating this, and that will probably take a good chunk of time today. I have a good ride coming up tomorrow, so at least I'm motivated.
