gasman said:
Welcome back Michael ! This solid state preloading sounds like a step forward, but, I wonder if it would reduce the flexibility. For example, could you load worldmap; what if the next upgrade (eg CN8 or 9) needs more memory than the 2710 has and would if it got wiped somehow it be easy to reload ?
Very good questions, Gasman.
My 2720 has 2 gigs of memory in it, and it appears that CN Europe
NT Version 7 only takes up about 1.3 megs - about 65% of the capacity. That leaves around 600 megs, or 30%, for future growth (allowing 100 megs of slop for speed camera databases, directorys, stuff like that). Personally, I think that should be good for at least two update cycles, in other words, it should take me to CN Europe 9 without any problems. After that - well, I suppose the user could be offered the choice of only loading certain countries at one time, if for example, CN Europe version 14 grows to 2.5 gigs in size total.
I really can't see much need to load other stuff into the memory. CitySelect South Africa is only about 250 megs in total, I'm not sure how big CN Middle East is, but I am going to speculate its not much bigger than CS SouthAfrica. CN North America is huge, of course, but there is more than enough space to load all the places that anyone from Europe would ever choose to visit. If someone wanted to do a '4 corners' ride of the USA, there would not be enough space, but if someone wanted to do that, there would not be much point in them buying the Atlantic model of the GPSR.
I am now using an Atlantic model 2720 (a test unit) - I was using an Americas unit up until the middle of last week. I had all of France, Germany, Switzerland and Benelux loaded into the 'spare capacity' of my Americas unit, so no space problems there. I have suggested to Garmin that they include the Americas basemap in the Atlantic model GPSRs (in other words, that any European spec GPSR come with both the Europe and North America basemap) as a courtesy to European users - this would make it easier for Europeans to use their GPSR in North America. But, basemaps get loaded into a different part of memory than normal maps, whether the GPSR has enough of 'that' kind of memory (whatever it is) available to hold both basemaps, I don't know.
The new CN Europe NT 7 is exactly the same cartography as the existing CN Europe 7, the only difference is that it contains the coding needed to support display of traffic messages that are recieved by FM radio. There is NO, repeat NO change to all the other map info.
As for the preload getting wiped out - as far as I know, this has never happened with any of the 2620 or 2660 units that come preloaded. I suppose that if something really horrible happened (e.g. you passed your GPSR through a MRI scanner or something like that) and the memory got wiped out, Garmin could send you a CD or DVD and an unlock code, and you could re-load the whole mess. But, that is just a guess. Updates to the preloaded units are handled by sending the user a special CD that writes directly to the GPSR.
Michael
