Garmin Zumo 550 My Review

[Fidius]

Having used the TomTom V3 Europe for my bike for some time a 10 day trip to southern france was looming so i wanted a satnav that could do almost everything and was waterproof the the choice was obviously between the rider and the zumo.I had three days before my trip which included leading 7 other bikes down with me from sunny yorkshire around a 1000 mile trip in 2 days,after reading the reviews my choice was made to buy the rider unfortunatly everywere local to me was sold out and with only a day left to go my only other option was the zumo 550.The gps was simple enough to mount and was full of features not present on the tomtom but i can honestly say i liked the mapping on the tomtom better,saying that the zumo got us down to the border of spain quite well,i must point out that the zumo struggled slightly to find smaller villages so be aware of this unless you have the coordinates then the zumo will let you down proof of this is when it was 2am in the morning and we were looking for our digs in a place called "Le Struel" the zumo could not find it but my m8's tomtom had it listed in its mapping "tomtom to the rescue" also when navigating the zumo has a strange way of taking you down smaller roads and cutting accross country rather than sticking to the motorways even when faster time is used although in a bizzare way you still get there just as quick.

The mp3 is a great option i used a seperate 2 gig SD card and filled it up with music and had non stop tunes while biking,the zumo will interupt the music to give you instructions then return to the music which is cool,also you can upload your photos to the system which is a novel idea.The unit worked great hrough heavy storms on the way back home in the uk and was dropped a few times and never let me down,i have not botherd to make use of the bluetooth yet as i just plug headphones into the unit which for cheapness its a good option.Another life saver was the POI say for instance you were low on fuel somewere in western europe you just clicked the fuel icon and it gave you the nearest station was was great and the same goes for food etc.I dont really have any complaints about the system other than slightly more data would have been nice on smaller villages but once you have the coordinates to these it will take you there.

[davsato]

we were looking for our digs in a place called "Le Struel" the zumo could not find it but my m8's tomtom had it listed in its mapping "tomtom to the rescue" also when navigating the zumo has a strange way of taking you down smaller roads and cutting accross country rather than sticking to the motorways even when faster time is used although in a bizzare way you still get there just as quick.

garmin have some strange names for places, sometimes they bear no relation to reality! also when looking up addresses the towns arent the same as what address you maybe just read in an ad.

the zumo has a thing for setting the preference what roads you want to use, and you need to carefully set your speeds on each road type. after a bit of fine tuning it gets better.