PDA

View Full Version : Opinions on the Garmin nuvi 2597 LMT with 5" screen



dennis thompson
09-05-2015, 9:38 AM
I am thinking about buying the Garmin Nuvi 2597 LMT with 5" screen.
Has anyone an opinion on this system or can you suggest another you might think is better,
in the $160 price range?
Thanks

Jamie Buxton
09-05-2015, 10:32 AM
I have an older Nuvi with a 5" screen -- the model 54. It works just fine.

Erik Loza
09-05-2015, 11:16 AM
This is just my opinion: I am basically "done" with any type of Garmin/TomTom/etc. I think it's a dead platform. We exclusively use Google Maps from our phones now. I haven't used my Nuvi for almost two years and don't miss it one bit. The issue I was running into was that each time you updated the Garmin, it would lose functionality. The last time I tried it, I paid $50 for the update and did not discover til we were on the road that there was a bug (I know this because it drove me insane and after searching the internet for it, discovered I was far from the only one who was experiencing the same issue...) that cause it to NOT BE ABLE TO SPEAK. I kept thinking I had it on mute or something like that it was a documented issue. Garmin's solution? Buy a newer unit.

If you just want a visual display to keep you company during the drive or give you an idea of the road ahead (which is not a bad thing; my dad has it for this reason), then you might be OK with a Garmin but as far as real-time traffic updates my Google maps has never been wrong. Uncanny, in fact, whatever data they stream that leads you on the best route. My suggestion is that rather than buy a garmin, spend that money on a good mount for you smartphone and use it, instead. Trust me: Google Maps is better, hands down.

Erik

Izzy Camire
09-05-2015, 12:41 PM
I just got the Garmin NUVI 65 LMT and my result has been mixed. I first used it to guide me to someplace where I knew about 20 miles away. It guided me exactly on the route I would normally take. When we got on the final state route of my destination it said approaching the place. Then it said we had arrived problem was that we were 2 miles away. I kept going figuring it might realize it screwed up but it never said anything. The next 2 times I used it it got right to where I was going with no problems.
I would never have bought this I am old fashion and just print out Mapquest directions but I got this as a compliment from work.
I would say the thing is ok but after the first problem I would be concerned if it was guiding me into some congested area.

Dave Lehnert
09-05-2015, 8:19 PM
I have a TomTom Start 50 with lifetime maps. I like it a lot. Map updates come 4 times a year. ($115 0n Amazon but got it at Christmas for around $75)
You can drive yourself crazy reading reviews. People seem to expect them to be 100% accurate but they always seem to get me close enough. I can't say I ever had a big problem.
I think a problem with a GPS at times is they are loaded with information taken from other sources. I know contractors would have problems finding my house when using a GPS. "Maps" used a name for my road that I never heard anyone local call it before. (But name is correct on some maps) When they typed in my address it would take them 1/2 hr up the road to the same house number on the same road just in another town.

Lee Schierer
09-05-2015, 9:15 PM
I have a Nuvi 2595LMT and it works very well. I like the voice control feature for when I'm driving alone and need to make a change. The voice thing can be a bit confusing as road noise and pronunciation make a difference on the unit understanding. I've found it to be pretty accurate, but it sometimes will route you via US highways because the software doesn't account for traffic lights very well if at all. The traffic function thus far has been accurate for the times we have been in areas where the service is available.

My son used to use his smart phone to navigate until he made a trip alone late one evening and got into an area with no cell phone coverage. His phone didn't tell him to turn when he should and it cost him some extra time on the road. That convinced him to get an actual GPS.

I've found errors on the Garmin maps and Google maps as well. I have friends that live in a large gated community in Pennsylvania and both Google maps and Garmin will take you to the wrong end of the road when you punch in their address which is about a mile difference.

Jamie Buxton
09-06-2015, 1:22 AM
This is just my opinion: I am basically "done" with any type of Garmin/TomTom/etc. I think it's a dead platform. We exclusively use Google Maps from our phones now. I haven't used my Nuvi for almost two years and don't miss it one bit. The issue I was running into was that each time you updated the Garmin, it would lose functionality. The last time I tried it, I paid $50 for the update and did not discover til we were on the road that there was a bug (I know this because it drove me insane and after searching the internet for it, discovered I was far from the only one who was experiencing the same issue...) that cause it to NOT BE ABLE TO SPEAK. I kept thinking I had it on mute or something like that it was a documented issue. Garmin's solution? Buy a newer unit.

If you just want a visual display to keep you company during the drive or give you an idea of the road ahead (which is not a bad thing; my dad has it for this reason), then you might be OK with a Garmin but as far as real-time traffic updates my Google maps has never been wrong. Uncanny, in fact, whatever data they stream that leads you on the best route. My suggestion is that rather than buy a garmin, spend that money on a good mount for you smartphone and use it, instead. Trust me: Google Maps is better, hands down.

Erik

Has it occurred to you that there are people who don't want to spend a hundred bucks per month in data charges on a smartphone?

Ken Fitzgerald
09-06-2015, 1:45 AM
I have Garmin nuvi. It's a newer model I have had for 5 years. I bought it at Costco IIRC and paid $75 for lifetime maps. It works well and the only time it has led us astray was being ignorant of a new roundabout in Bend,OR.

Larry Frank
09-06-2015, 7:17 AM
I have a Garmin Nuvi and am pleased with it. The majority of the time it does really well. I also have a smartphone and prefer to use the Garmin.

Erik Loza
09-06-2015, 8:14 AM
Has it occurred to you that there are people who don't want to spend a hundred bucks per month in data charges on a smartphone?

I assume you didn't want to come across as crass in that reply, as I likewise don't want to but since you asked, I assume you know there are folks who already use their mobile devices and data plans quite heavily and who also shop competitive data plan pricing.

If folks don't operate that way, then perhaps the stand-alone GPS makes sense for them. But for those of us who use our mobile devices heavily, there would have to be a compelling reason to pay for and use an extra piece of hardware that does the exact same thing our phones do. That's what I was trying to say. But that's OK if it doesn't work for you. Just my 2-cents as always.

Erik

Curt Harms
09-06-2015, 8:31 AM
Like Lee, We have the LMT2595 w/free lifetime maps and traffic. I bought it refurbed with factory warranty off da Bay for a bit less than $100. It looked factory new but was not in a Garmin box . In addition to the navigation functions, it has bluetooth so hands-free phone function. We are not fans of the audible prompts but there's an icon that when tapped mutes the voice. That icon also mutes the ringing sound when placing a call. If there's an answer audio is there. Incoming calls ring and can be answered even with mute on. It has a micro SD card so stored routes don't take up space in onboard flash. Previously I had a Pioneer. Hardware was great, software was awful.

Wade Lippman
09-06-2015, 10:49 AM
I just got a Nokia Lumia 635 for $13. The GPS they supply with it is as good as my 2 year old Garmin and the screen is almost as big. (the gps with my old Nokia Lumia 520 sucked) You don't need to have a contract for it as you can download maps over wifi. Though you can get a $100 1 year contract through H2O that will give you 2000 minutes or txts, or the equivalent of data; I got that for my old phone and just leave it in my card so i know I have something.

Has it occurred to you that there are people who don't want to spend a hundred bucks per month in data charges on a smartphone?
For my new phone I have an unlimited plan from Straighttalk for $40/month. I sure don't want to spend a hundred buck per month in data charges!

Myk Rian
09-06-2015, 2:03 PM
I have a Garmin Nuvi and am pleased with it. The majority of the time it does really well. I also have a smartphone and prefer to use the Garmin.
Likewise. Our Nuvi has always been good at directing us. We keep it in her car, so I use my phone. It doesn't use up a whole lot of data. I get 2gig, and have never gotten to 600meg.

Jerry Thompson
09-06-2015, 2:14 PM
I still have a flip cell phone and I use printed maps for the most part. Remember the old maps one could never refold correctly?

Bob Rufener
09-06-2015, 3:15 PM
I have had two Garmins and like them a lot. They don't always give the best routing but it always gets me to where I want to go. I have a smart phone with limited data on it and have used it for navigation. I like the stand alone GPS devices as it has a large screen, gives me lanes of travel and which one I should be in, gives me audio directions in advance of turns, and I can view the screen easily to see curves and turns ahead of me. I have upgraded maps-it takes a loooong time to update but was easy to do. I am not familiar with the model you are considering but Amazon has a lot of reviews and 80% gave it a 4 or 5 rating. I saw it for sale for $114. Just make sure you get lifetime maps included. My wife and I took a trip to New Zealand a few years ago and bought a micro sd card with the maps and other information for the country and it really worked out well. Maps are available for most countries of the world. We take the Garmin whenever we travel and use a car.

Barry McFadden
09-06-2015, 4:28 PM
I have a Nuvi 2595 and for the most part it works well....It started giving a "poor satellite reception" message whenever it felt like it ...sometimes for 1 min and other times for up to 10 min. Garmin replaced it and the new one sometimes still does it. It seems I could have it on for 3 weeks in a row when I'm not going anywhere special and it works fine. The day I'm going on a trip as I pull out of the driveway I would get the message!!!!! Once in a snowstorm and with the highway crawling along in an unfamiliar area I decided to take the first exit I could and see what route the GPS would give me......of course as soon as I got off the highway I got the "poor satellite reception" message!!!...had to stop and buy a map...but in the last few months it seems to be fine.

Lee Schierer
09-06-2015, 8:34 PM
Bary, I've had similar issues with my 2595, but they are usually related to really heavy cloud cover or sunspot activity. It usually only lasts a minute or two. Sometimes you can turn it off and back on and it clears up.

Brian Elfert
09-06-2015, 10:05 PM
I rarely use the GPS feature on my iPhone as it sucks the battery dry in a hurry. I suppose I should just get a car charger to eliminate that issue. I get 2GB a month and don't use even 10% of that most months. For the most part I still print Google maps when going some place new, but it can be dangerous trying to read the map and drive.

I had a guy come to my house recently. He used his GPS and ended up at the house next door. He called me and asked why I wasn't home. I said nobody was at my house and he must be at the wrong place. He was insisting he was at the right house number simply because his GPS said it was the right place. I finally convinced him he was at the wrong house and he drove over to my house. I don't know why he couldn't do something as basic as look at the house number to see he was at the wrong house.

Scott Shepherd
09-06-2015, 10:21 PM
Keep in mind that that model is a 2013 model I think. I have the same one and we also own one of the new models. Overall they work really well. Just be careful buying because a lot of the cheaper prices are models that are 2-3 years old when a 2015 isn't that much more expensive.

dennis thompson
09-07-2015, 8:32 AM
Keep in mind that that model is a 2013 model I think. I have the same one and we also own one of the new models. Overall they work really well. Just be careful buying because a lot of the cheaper prices are models that are 2-3 years old when a 2015 isn't that much more expensive.
Scott
Can you tell me the differences between the 2013 and the newer models? And the model numbers of the newer ones so I can take a look at them?
thanks

Scott Shepherd
09-07-2015, 8:54 AM
Dennis, try this link, it gives a model year list on the left side. I was about to buy one a while back and went to this site and realized it was discontinued, so we bought the newer model for just a little more.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/cOnTheRoad-cAutomotive-p1.html

Mike Null
09-07-2015, 9:14 AM
My Garmin is several years old and I just paid $50 to update it last year. It has generally been satisfactory. But I'll use my cell phone in the future. And I won't buy a new car with navigation as an option.

Barry McFadden
09-07-2015, 9:20 AM
Bary, I've had similar issues with my 2595, but they are usually related to really heavy cloud cover or sunspot activity. It usually only lasts a minute or two. Sometimes you can turn it off and back on and it clears up.


Lee....when mine would act up it would be a perfectly clear day ....tried turning it off and on ..same thing...
and it would happen off and on for about an hour or more then for some reason at about 10:00 am it would start to work properly and I wouldn't have a problem for the rest of the day..

Roger Feeley
09-07-2015, 11:11 PM
We have two Nuvis and like them both. Both have FM traffic and lifetime maps. I'm sort of partial to Garmin because I live about 10 miles from their headquarters and know a lot of programmers over there. I work for Frontline Test Equipment writing sniffer software and I was doing some Bluetooth training over at Garmin. As an ice-breaker, I mentioned that I had the nuvi and really liked the user interface. A guy in the audience piped up and said, "Thanks, I designed that interface." Small world.

Curt Harms
09-08-2015, 8:14 AM
...............
I had a guy come to my house recently. He used his GPS and ended up at the house next door. He called me and asked why I wasn't home. I said nobody was at my house and he must be at the wrong place. He was insisting he was at the right house number simply because his GPS said it was the right place. I finally convinced him he was at the wrong house and he drove over to my house. I don't know why he couldn't do something as basic as look at the house number to see he was at the wrong house.

That sounds like a database issue. We see the same thing around here due to some 'interesting' naming conventions from colonial times and peculiar zip code assignments. One business destination is off by a couple miles. Right road, wrong cross street. If I enter our house address (we live in a townhouse community) I end up a few hundred feet off. I don't count on GPS to get me to an address's front door. It does get me pretty close reliably. Looking for a house or building number does seem sorta basic, doesn't it?

roger wiegand
09-08-2015, 12:51 PM
I'm on my fifth one now, the latest with lifetime maps and traffic for both Europe and US. 98% of the time I use Google Maps on the phone because the routing is much better and the traffic information is both accurate (at least in Boston) and actionable, with good alternate routes proposed on the fly. My newest Nuvi is downright squirrelly for search and routing. The search functionality is awful in the new version compared to 3-5 year old units, especially outside the usa. If would not find my hotel by name in Mexico, even though I could see it from where we were sitting unless I put in an unknown and unknowable municipality name as well in the "search near" field. When we moved a half mile over some border it found it using the same name without difficulty (by then, of course I no longer needed instructions). I suppose they are trying to make the search faster by limiting the radius, but have taken it to an unfortunate extreme. On routing it frequently likes to send me on scenic detours around the neighborhood to avoid driving on some 50 ft piece of road for no apparent reason. Fortunately it mostly does these little extraneous around the block exercises close to home where I know to avoid it.

If you travel where there's reasonable data signal most of the time it's hard to beat Google for accuracy, search, and routing. Plus, for many of us, it's already paid for. In the lands beyond cell signals the nuvi is good, but be aware you need a good, full address to find anything that's not close by, at least ex-US. (Coordinates are even safer)

None of them do a decent job with height and other truck restrictions, a real failing for those of us driving larger vehicles from time to time. I feel like hitting it every time it tries to route my truck onto one of the NY/NJ parkways.

dennis thompson
09-08-2015, 3:41 PM
thanks for the advice. I think I'm going to do with the Garmin NUVI 2597

Matt Meiser
09-08-2015, 3:50 PM
Has it occurred to you that there are people who don't want to spend a hundred bucks per month in data charges on a smartphone?

Anyone spending that kind of money for data probably needs to be a little more careful about their data usage or find a better carrier.

Curt Harms
09-09-2015, 10:05 AM
..................................................

None of them do a decent job with height and other truck restrictions, a real failing for those of us driving larger vehicles from time to time. I feel like hitting it every time it tries to route my truck onto one of the NY/NJ parkways.

Doesn't Garmin offer a trucker's version? I thought I saw such an animal when researching. It wasn't commonly offered and I don't recall where I saw it any more. I don't have much experience with larger vehicles but something that would route me such that my load wasn't 6" taller than that bridge just ahead would be handy. The results of of such incidents make the local evening news periodically. Even if the driver has the sense to stop & check, it's gotta be awkward doing a 180 on a narrow 2 lane road.

Erik Loza
09-09-2015, 12:35 PM
...Google Maps on the phone because the routing is much better and the traffic information is both accurate (at least in Boston) and actionable, with good alternate routes proposed on the fly...

This mirrors our experience in pretty much any urban driving situation, no matter where it has been. Can't tell you how many times Google Maps has proposed a route that did not make sense at the moment but lo and behold, there was some sort of construction or traffic jam that we would have otherwise been unaware of. It's uncanny, in fact. If the Garmin was somehow better at doing what it was supossed to do, then I could justify having it but so far, it is just a visual display of a roadmap, not the aid in commuting that we really want. Our phones just do it better.

Erik

Larry Browning
09-09-2015, 1:25 PM
I've just never had very good luck with Google maps. At least to me anyway it is very confusing. The screen is just way too busy. I live and drive mostly in a rural environment so traffic delays are pretty much non existent. I like seeing the speed limit posted on the screen right next to my current speed in a LARGE font so I can read it at a glance. I also like it showing my ETA in an easy to find spot on the screen. Google maps may have all the latest info on traffic and map updates, but you just can't beat the Garmin interface. Of course YMMV depending on what is important to you and how you use it.

roger wiegand
09-09-2015, 2:38 PM
Doesn't Garmin offer a trucker's version?

Various companies offer truckers versions, the problem is that there apparently isn't a good database for either height or weight restrictions. I've read the truckers forums endlessly hoping for one that would be worthwhile but the horror stories are unending. Lots of complaints about incorrect weight limits on roads as well as missing or incorrect height information. The current auto maps are so good because they rely both on government info and on crowdsourced corrections. Apparently not enough folks are willing to take the time to report bogus height/weight info for trucks. Also lots of funny stories about guys in 18-wheelers being directed down streets way to narrow to accommodate that kind of truck. My rig is much smaller, but I really hate backing out of blind alleys!

Kent Adams
09-09-2015, 3:23 PM
Dennis, if you have a smartphone, there is no need for this purchase. Your smartphone can give you turn by turn directions and a visual if you need to see it. I travel all day and no longer rely on my car's navigation system, which even though its a Lexus and a 2014, isn't as easy to use or as good as my iPhone's. Same would be true for an Android phone.

Kent Adams
09-09-2015, 3:28 PM
Ken do you have a smartphone? If so, why would you spend a dime on this device?