Garmin Zumo 500 or 550 ?

Looking to change my GPS to a Zumo 500 or 550 . The 550 is approx £100 + more than the 500. Wondering if the 550 is worth the extra cash.

Does anybody know what the main differences are between the two units ?.

Is the memory size smaller on the 500 ?

I have checked the Garmin website but can not find the memory size for either unit.

Quite simple and I'm suprised you can't read for yourself on the Garmin website!! The 500 has maps for UK. The 550 has maps for Europe. Otherwise they're exactly the same.

Howard Millichap said:

Quite simple and I'm suprised you can't read for yourself on the Garmin website!! The 500 has maps for UK. The 550 has maps for Europe. Otherwise they're exactly the same.

Click to expand...

Plus the 550 comes with car mounting kit whereas the 500 only comes with bike mounting hardware...

Dutch

bumble beemer said:

Does anybody know what the main differences are between the two units ?.

Is the memory size smaller on the 500 ?

I have checked the Garmin website but can not find the memory size for either unit.

Click to expand...

Hmmm, just got off the phone about 2 min ago from the dealer asking him the exact same question and here you ask it....

Apparently main differences are:
550 has TTS (text to speech) which the 500 does not. 500 just says "turn left in 500yards" 550 will say "turn left in 500yards to Queen Street"
550 comes with vehicle mounting bits (althought they can be purchased seperately).
500 has 500mb internal memory, 550 has 2GB. Personally I'm not sure if this is an issue seeing as you can use SD cards if you need more storage.
500 has differnt map set, although seeing as I'm in deepest darkest Africa, the Europe maps are hardly a concern

Dale

Howard Millichap said:

Quite simple and I'm suprised you can't read for yourself on the Garmin website!! The 500 has maps for UK. The 550 has maps for Europe. Otherwise they're exactly the same.

Click to expand...

Howard, I had read their website and had read the difference on pre loaded maps. I did not want to make an assumption that the 550 comes with more memory just because it is preloaded with more maps. I could not find on their website the spec to confirm the memory sizes for each unit. I suspected that the memory was larger on the 550 hence the large difference in price and hence my question on here.

Dale, well done and thank you for your response.

Some of these differences are crazy really.

The UK zumo 500 has 486MB of internal memory and does not speak the street names

The Australian zumo 550 has 486MB (and I would suggest is hardware identical) but because it is a '550' it speaks the street names.

It is a bit odd that Garmin is artifically removing features, particuarly ones like TTS, which is almost standard on most units now.