New Garmin Zumo XT Review - Updated

[armour783]

My old 595 has 99% of the same functionality, plus TPMS, if only the screen would be better.

I'm getting rid of my 595 and moving over to the XT for this very reason. The 595 screen is embarrassing dim. There is no way Garmin actually tested that unit's screen in direct sunlight with an actual motorcycle rider, or it would have never left the factory that way.

I was riding last weekend and since I hadn't been on the bike in over a year, it made me so mad that the screen was basically impossible to see if I had my helmets internal sunvisor down, in the mid day sun. I searched for, and picked up, a used XT as soon as I got home. The 595 will be up for sale soon.

With regards to everyone's audio issues, I've had the exact same problems with Garmin's Bluetooth integration with almost every single unit they've put out. They all suck moist ass. My 550, 660, and 595 have all been clearly designed to only be connected to a phone. And that's it. They want you to use the GPS as a hub. But their connectivity sucks balls. Audio always sucks. Connections never seem to work the way their supposed to. It makes me never want to connect to a Garmin product via Bluetooth every again because I just know I'll be disappointed.

It makes you frustrated because other manufacturers have figured out how to make Bluetooth connections stable. Why can't Garmin do it!

 

[lakota]

Interesting stuff. My experiences are quite different. For example, Saturday in my failed attempt at the ice cream insanity I was in frog strangling rain near Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and had no screen issues.
I wonder if Steve Gallant’s issues with the phone are android related I run my iPhone through the XT and have no problems with the connections or sound quality. And that’s withusing it simultaneously to listen to the XM app.

 

[Greg Rice]

Some of these comments are making me think twice about buying a second Zumo XT to replace my Dezl 770. I have not had any rain or routing issues so far with mine.

 

[Steve Gallant]

Marc, how did you solve the routing issues. I have the XT set on fastest route and no avoidances at all times. Despite that, whenever I'd follow Google or my Zumo 350 during the rally, once the XT finally agreed to recalc, it also agreed that the new route was actually faster. Seems like an algorithm problem that would need to be fixed by Garmin...?

I've solved 99 percent of the odd routing issues and the phone and app issues are new just started happening during the last few days of the IBR. Hopefully that's a bug that Garmin corrects because it was a huge pita.

.

 

[Marc11]

Marc, how did you solve the routing issues. I have the XT set on fastest route and no avoidances at all times. Despite that, whenever I'd follow Google or my Zumo 350 during the rally, once the XT finally agreed to recalc, it also agreed that the new route was actually faster. Seems like an algorithm problem that would need to be fixed by Garmin...?

Yeah totally agree, at one point my XT disagreed with both Google and my BMW GPS by over 150 miles.

Anyway I have to double check, but I believe I changed the mode to car from motorcycle and set it to shortest distance. After that, it matched Google pretty much spot on all of leg 3 routing point to point.

Can't say it will always work, just a small sample, but it seemed to resolve. Regardless I ended up using my phone and Google's MyMaps feature to route the rest of Leg 3 point to point because I couldn't trust the XT.

 

[Marc11]

Some of these comments are making me think twice about buying a second Zumo XT to replace my Dezl 770. I have not had any rain or routing issues so far with mine.

Yeah, I had zero routing or rain issues until recently. Makes me think Garmin did something in a firmware to screw the routing. The rain, I could have had just a bad unit.

 

[Auburn]

I didn't have any issues with my XT in the rain (Several times of very heavy rain with water on the screen). I did treat the screen with a silicone cleaner polish by Flowgenix. Don't know if that helped or not. The rain didn't really bead on the screen, so maybe that did help.

The one thing that I really hate about the latest updates with the 595 and the XT, is that it defaulted to avoid U Turns, which caused me to go about 25 miles (each way) out of my way to turn around. Since removed that avoidance.

I ran both the XT and 595 set up exactly the same preferences and avoidances, and there were times the two didn't agree. I followed the XT, because the 595 was trying to take me off the highway to another road. It may have been shorter, but not sure it was faster.

 

[Greg Rice]

I forgot to mention I have a screen protector on my Zumo XT. Maybe that is why rain has not been a problem.

 

[Marc11]

I forgot to mention I have a screen protector on my Zumo XT. Maybe that is why rain has not been a problem.

I've heard the opposite, they make it worse. In fact it was the first thing the Garmin rep asked me and said they screen wasn't designed to work with screen protectors. Strange.

 

[Greg Rice]

I've heard the opposite, they make it worse. In fact it was the first thing the Garmin rep asked me and said they screen wasn't designed to work with screen protectors. Strange.

I have a screen protector that was meant for another GPS that I cut to fit the Zumo XT because no one was making one for the Zumo XT. Maybe what you said is why no one is making a screen protector for the Zumo XT.

 

[Auburn]

There are several glass screen protectors for sale EDIT: now on Amazon specifically for the XT.

 

[Greg Rice]

There are several glass screen protectors for sale on Amazon specifically for the XT.

When I bought my Zumo XT ( the first day they were released ) there was no screen protectors on the market so I made my own.

 

[Auburn]

When I bought my Zumo XT ( the first day they were released ) there was no screen protectors on the market so I made my own.

Poorly worded on my part. I should have said, there are several now available on Amazon specifically for the XT

 

[Marc11]

My replacement XT arrived Wednesday. I'll post up if there is any rain improvement. One thing I have to hand to Garmin, when you have a warranty repair you ship them just the GPS, nothing else, you keep the cradle, wiring, etc and they send you a brand new retail boxes unit complete with all accessories.

Pretty generous of them, and it's nice to have a spare cradle and wire harness.

I was also impressed with the speed, they received my returned unit on Monday, shipped my replacement on Monday and UPS delivered it Wednesday. Impressive service.

 

[biquer]

My confidence is ebbing away, I picked a favourite leaving home, it was a straight 200 mile North-South no-brainer ride on main roads. The XT was showing 37 more miles than the Tomtom, I zoomed out and the XT was taking me miles East through small towns and villages which would have added an hour to the route. I ignored it but it was nearly 100 miles in before it recalculated the correct route, riding along a straight road it suddenly stopped telling me to U-turn and instantly knocked about 50 miles off the route. That's just plain wrong! Some people I know are reporting similar.

 

[rneal55555]

It's the Map Data. There are times when the map is missing or has additional data that causes odd routing. Sometimes it's a missing or disconnected road other times its erroneous speed data. It pays to compare it with google maps and with practice/local knowledge you learn what to ignore or not.

 

[Stephen!]

My confidence is ebbing away, I picked a favourite leaving home, it was a straight 200 mile North-South no-brainer ride on main roads. The XT was showing 37 more miles than the Tomtom, I zoomed out and the XT was taking me miles East through small towns and villages which would have added an hour to the route. I ignored it but it was nearly 100 miles in before it recalculated the correct route, riding along a straight road it suddenly stopped telling me to U-turn and instantly knocked about 50 miles off the route. That's just plain wrong! Some people I know are reporting similar.

My 478 will do that if I neglect to disable the CN North America 2014.4 mapset that is somehow still contained in its memory somewhere. It re-enables that mapset whenever I transfer waypoimts. One example of the screwy stuff it does: Sitting in Watford City, ND telling it to route me to Minot. The resulting route takes me south out of Watford City all the way to the SD border, make a U-Turn, go back the way I came, right past the place I started then "normal" route from there. Another one: Dickinson to Minot... Get on I-94, go east to Fargo, get on I-29, go north into Canada, turn right at Winnipeg, continue to the first exit at the Ontario border, turn around and go back the way you came, proceed to Minot.

This really became a problem on Leg 3 of the IBR when I forgot to disable the 2014 mapset aftr loading the bonus list. Fortunately I realized it fairly quickly, but not until after a few really weird "WTF?" navigation attempts by the 478.

 

[Factor]

I've heard the opposite, they make it worse. In fact it was the first thing the Garmin rep asked me and said they screen wasn't designed to work with screen protectors. Strange.

I've had a Garmin Montana 600 for about 10 years now. I first picked it up used and went to replace the screen protector. As I peeled it off, it destroyed the touch screen underneath by pulling the laminated layers apart. If you can't replace a scratched up protector, what's the point? I've been running the replacement screen without a protector ever since with no visible damage to the screen. That unit is sure getting long in the tooth and beginning to look for a replacement. Great thread.

 

[Pappy35]

I stepped away from this thread for a while and in the meantime, I bought an XT and put it to the test a couple of weeks later by running a 1,400 mile round robin trip. Memphis to Huntsville, AL -> Chattanooga, TN -> the Dragon and surrounding area -> Cincinnati, OH -> back to Memphis.

In summary, the thing was brilliant.

Playing mp3's worked great (something that for one reason or another I've never done on a motorcycle), I made and received a few calls and I loved the weather radar! I ran through about 400 miles of steady rain with occasional very heavy downpours that I knew were coming thanks to this feature. The routing worked great though I will say that Basecamp is a horrible tool to use. I mean, once I figured it out, it worked and the XT followed the three Smokie Mountain routes I set up perfectly with no issues whatsoever. There was a day or two there where I was about ready to throw the kit into a chipper.

Traffic worked very well. I had it paired to my phone and evidently Garmin is tied into a real-time, or near real-time database as it warned me numerous times about traffic issues, even in fairly remote areas. It did miss one or two backups but on the whole, it worked much better than I expected. I do wish text notifications would time out rather than having to be individually dismissed. It also lost its mind once but that was resolved immediately by restarting it (I didn't even have to restart the route, it just picked up right where it left off).

As for cost, I got it for $399 thanks to another one of special sales and it was well worth that.

Basecamp was a nightmare and I was about to return the thing (the built-in trip planner is horrible BTY) until I stumbled on this YouTube series. While there are a number of tutorial series out there, I found most of them either too long or filled with "hit subscribe to..." prompts, "buy my maintenance videos series" commercials (if you ride a Goldwing you know know I'm talking about) and useless jabbering preambles. This guy's channel hit the perfect sweet spot - concise, to the point, relatively brief (who wants to sit through 5 hours of video to learn how to plan a route? Not me). One pass through a subset of all the parts and I was working with Basecamp like a pro. Of course, you do need to double check any waypoints you select. For instance, Southern Honda in Chattanooga recently moved and the Garmin database still has their old address. Google however was correct. Though that was the one and only error I encountered, it was notable and a good lesson-learned.

 

[Auburn]

Basecamp was a nightmare and I was about to return the thing (the built-in trip planner is horrible BTY) until I stumbled on this YouTube series. While there are a number of tutorial series out there, I found most of them either too long or filled with "hit subscribe to..." prompts, "buy my maintenance videos series" commercials (if you ride a Goldwing you know know I'm talking about) and useless jabbering preambles. This guy's channel hit the perfect sweet spot - concise, to the point, relatively brief (who wants to sit through 5 hours of video to learn how to plan a route? Not me). One pass through a subset of all the parts and I was working with Basecamp like a pro. Of course, you do need to double check any waypoints you select. For instance, Southern Honda in Chattanooga recently moved and the Garmin database still has their old address. Google however was correct. Though that was the one and only error I encountered, it was notable and a good lesson-learned.

Great video series. Thanks!