Garmin Zumo 660 - Coming Soon!

[gbrckly]

Got mine, but with a software fault

Got my 660 last week from Purelywebstores £426 inc. delivery. The thing would not remember any settings I changed, ie miles, English UK voice, map view, keyboard type etc. When turned off and back on it kept returning to default settings...kilometers, English American voice (awful), 3D view and other unwanted settings ...drove me nuts. Eventually solved the problem by downloading the latest software 2.80 from Garmin. Maybe this unit shouldn't have been released with the flawed 2.70 software installed, I didn't expect all this hassle after parting with 426 quid. Purelywebstores were ok, offered an exchange or refund, but it works fine now so I'm keeping it . They only had 5 in and they went like hot cakes...no more until end of May.

 

[Buzby]

Mine arrived on Friday from Handtec, and it had the latest firmware (2.80) showing at switchon, so no issues on that score. I have to say, having now used it on the bike for a 'run in the sun', I'm not overly impressed when compared to my earlier Garmin GPS 60Csx (looks like a walktie talkie). This used the same mapping, with roads depicred as coloured lines, rather than the current trend of roads being depicted as twin lines with a colour infill.

My issue was more mundane, in bright sunlight, whether behind or beaming directly onto the display, the mapping becomes invisible. It may be 'daylight visible' but not sunlight visible - as high levels of ambient light make it hard to see, fortunately up here in Scotland these kind of days are few and far between, and evens so, the spoken voice instructions make a good compromise.

The RAM mouting gear is (of course) excellent, and I'd already gad the required mounting hardware in place for my earlier GPS, so it was a smoth transition. Looking at the 3D icons and the ability to spiral round your location to get a mental picture of your location may be useful to some, but I'm not sold on it, it seems gimmicky for gimmick sake. I've always orientated myself wth North up as I find it wasy to envisage a route this way, and 3D may be fun, a rorating map gives me a greater headache, so it is just as well that 3D can be turned off.

So far, so good - I'll check out the extras later, and it was odd to be told when connecting it to the PC that the '2010' Europe mapping was available as a free download for 60 days. Good on them for making it availale at no cost, but '2010' mapping? I don't think so!

 

[chasr]

I've always orientated myself wth North up as I find it wasy to envisage a route this way, and 3D may be fun, a rorating map gives me a greater headache, so it is just as well that 3D can be turned off.

I was the same. A committed North_up_2D man, and with auto-recalc turned off. Not any more, though. The autozoom on these later Zumos & Nuvis is very good. 3D (perspective for the pedants) is very useful, and the autozoom is also quite handy. There are shortcuts to getting the North_up_2D view (try just tapping the screen from 3D view), so all is not lost. It's also easy to see a route overview, though the many flags can hide detail (change the flags one by one to small green dots).

Try it

 

[Buzby]

I found this today by accident. I'm beginning to like this Zumo - and the screen size is so, so vast! I may even be tempted to get a Bluetooth gizmo for my helmet after all, as the incidental voice prompts are being lost to the breeze....! (Although, that said - there have been times when hearing vehicles doing crazy things behind me, when my mirrors show me nothing behind has made me more careful of relying without ambiant sound whilst riding. (Yes, I know to look round as well, but you know what I mean!).

This will be truly the first Garmin I have had that that will work across all my vehicles (Car, Motorhome/RV, Bike X 2, which is a pity it's going to cost me so much in purchasing additional cradles!