Well i was afraid it wouldn't do all the things i wanted it to, but it does and does so much more besides. Its simply great at what it is and what it should do, especially setting up a multi stop journey, so easy so quick. It even remembers your favourite searches and places and next time they're just there waiting to be selected, it searches very quickly, it changes your route very quickly if you divert or miss a turn, and on the odd occasion there was traffic trouble it came up on the display. The 7 inch display is very clear and easy to use, and using the garmin universal dash mount (which is great too) you can place it in just the optimum position for un-obstructive yet easy glancing viewing.
Its powered by a thicj cable from the cigarette lighter socket that also doubles as the traffic warning news aerial, so thats a little messy to sort out, but soon got used to it, especially as the device works so well and you start to fall in love with it. There is a little downside to it though, i found when in city centres and you approach very complex junctions, the car symbol can move a little too slowly and you think its pointing to one road when in fact it wants you on another, so i did miss a road or two, but that could be my error, but it soon re-calculates and gets you back on track again, in seconds. The other gripe was the traffic service, which did not warn of a major snarl up around a huge roundabout in preston that was being 'improved', hah, the works had clearly been going on for weeks and the traffic was backed up all over the place (had two major roads and motorway junction to sort out there), and yet it was not aware and so did not avoid the area, we drove straight in to the chaos. However, overall its a fantastic piece of kit and cannot recommend it highly enough. My only other experience of a satnav by the way is the one built into the dash of my honda cr-v, which is very good, but this garmin simply blows it away.
Not being a huge fan of sat navs i have to say this is fabulous. Purchased the week prior to going on holiday to the states, just in time to downloaded updated us maps, which did take a few hours but was well worth it. Sat nav worked minutes after arriving and got us everywhere we asked it to, and even round a diverted route owing to a road closure. Images very clear and it's easy to use to find restaurants, shops and attractions.
Did have a laugh at pronounciation of some of the us place names. The garmin was a replacement for a tom tom which we had purchased a couple of weeks prior but which wouldn't let us load up us maps. Would highly recommend this product.
Pros
- Excellent and lightweight device
- Well worth the money!
- Slightly disappointed Garmin customer.
- I'm in love with my Gar!
- Latest unit but not so hot software
- A Change Is As Good As A Rest?
Cons
- Sadly, a huge disappointment
- Maybe I was unlucky
- Not what I expect from Garmin.
- Garmin still having problems - one year later!
- Navigation software can't be trusted & poor handsfree phone performance.
- Replacement Sat Nav
Negative Review of Garmin nuvi 2577LT 5" Sat Nav with UK and Full Europe and North America Maps and Free Lifetime Traffic Alerts
Features of Garmin nuvi 2577LT 5" Sat Nav with UK and Full Europe and North America Maps and Free Lifetime Traffic Alerts
- Easy to use bright 5" touchscreen sat nav includes preloaded street maps for Europe and North America
- Free Lifetime Traffic Alerts provide reliable traffic information to avoid incidents and congestion
- Sync with a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone for hands-free calling
- PhotoReal and BirdsEye Junction View and Active Lane Guidance clearly shows the lane you need to take
- Real Directions™ provide clear guidance using recognisable buildings and landmarks as reference
Well Worth the Money!. We bought this to replace our old garmin as we were about to go to poland, by road, for the first time. Amazingly you can put in your destination, which was across five countries (england, france, belgium, holland, germany and poland) and it will just find the shortest route. It not only tells you, as do the others, to turn right or left but gives you the name of the street too. The only negative is that it sees delays on the route (anywhere on the 12 hour route) and asks you if you would like to take an alternative route. At first we were taking the alternative route until we realised that these delays were often 200 or 300 kilometers away and not likely to affect us but that the diversions would probably delay us more! wish it would say how far away the delays were!.
Excellent. Brilliant sat nav, very fast, instant re-routes, clear display and good mapping. No more "do a u turn immediately"! the sat nav menu system is excellent and intuitive. The window mount is good, and my satnav came with a soft case, but not all do, so check the supplier. My sat nav came with maps pre-installed, but i did refresh them with a free update soon after purchase, this probably was not necessary but did it as it was a free update. The sat nav also needed its firmware updating, all very straight forward to do once software was installed on pc. The whole process including updating all maps took under an hour, and could be left unattended while it updated. Bluetooth integrates easily with my android phone to answer or make calls, access the phones address book etc. It's worth exploring the settings, for example the audio mixer allows you to set different volume levels for different features i. E. Phone loud, speed alerts quieter, and lots of other useful personalisation features. Voice recognition is mostly excellent; you can speak the menu and easily select your menu options and get to the maps by voice control. It gets it right most time, even if the car radio is on. However mine is very poor at recognising street and place names using voice recognition, it gets it wrong 95% of the time, so i now enter destination manually. No real problem and you may not want to use voice recognition anyway. Live traffic connects ok with power lead supplied, but has not shown any traffic warning information during first three weeks of use, but perhaps this is just lucky because i live in the countryside and have not been on any very heavily congested roads recently. Nothing happened with junction at first, so was not sure it was working, but when on the motorway the junction view popped up automatically to show exit lanes. Very helpful feature. Speed camera alerts are good, there are very clear visual and audible warnings for most of the likely locations, but be warned just a few established locations are missing. I subscribed to camera updates (only an annual subscription available for uk at about £16), now wish i had not bothered as so far it has made no difference, just as well have stayed with the pre-installed camera alerts. I installed the free garmin android app, this gave a good connection to my sat nav and was easy to install. I was disapopointed that some of the potentially very useful app feature on the phone such as parking, safety cameras, live traffic all needed additional subscriptions even though my satnav came with lifetime map updates and traffic. I chose not to subscribe to these android phone extras. Overall this is a great sat nav and i recommend it and price is very good value with lifetime updates. It is much better than any other satnav that i have owned. .
Slightly Disappointed Garmin Customer.. Pre ordered mine and very pleased that it arrive on day of release. Having previously had years of great service from a basic tomtom one i was a reluctant convert to garmin but so many bad reviews of latest tomtom products persuaded me to make the change. I really only wanted to add europe for a long driving holiday and the old tomtom didn't have that. I have lots of reservations however about this garmin not least of all was it failure to work properly after a couple of hours down the french motorway on day 1 of the two week drive through europe for which i had specifically bought it (i had previously done a trip to scotland and the west country and it was fine then) ! the unit froze on us whilst driving and then having switched off would not restart it just kept cycling through a start up screen and then off again, and no amount of button pushing would stop it. Several hours of internet searching that evening and pushing bits of the screen to try to do a master reset seemed to sort it out in the end but i had by then lost all the trip data for that part of the journey, and all my favourites all put in for the trip we were on! i was not happy at all. If we had been on our own on the trip with no web access we would have had a serious issue, fortunately we had friends with us to assist and get us back on track on that day. We had paper maps etc, but not so easy locating hotels in strange town with those is it. !a few more cons compared to my old and very basic tomtom. You can't get all the info you need on the main screen. I want to see the current time, the distance and time to my destination all at a glance, tomtom does it, garmin needs more presses of the screen to get all that. And i can't understand why they don't allow this, as you can customise the sidebar but you simply can't add the info to that i think you need. Very poor that. You should not need to touch the unit to get something as basic as the current time up. Update, this model now has all the info on the screen you need, a software update put that right a few months ago. It makes this a far more friendly unit to use now. Tomtom warms about toll roads etc when it plans a route, garmin doesn't. You can add them as 'avoidances' but it would be nice to get a warning beforehand. Tomtom give you options to customise the sound of alerts, no flexibility at all with garmin, you get what you a given. Pros. The ability to browse and zoom in and out of the maps is a lot better than on my old tomtom. And the overview map that shows mountains etc is a great way to get a feel for your trip and its then possibly to zoom right into the details of the route. Routing. Dodgy in my opinion, but aren't all sat navs! several times garmin has tried to take me off motorways for no apparent reason, or cut corners in small villages to take you down bumpy narrow back roads where its way better to carry on through on the main road. This garmin also has no option to set a route for walking, my old tomtom did, and so do older garmins so why not this one? particular stupid as it will remember where you parked your car if you need to find it but it then gives you driving directions back to it !beware if planning to use this somewhere like the alps as we did. It will lose reception in the numerous tunnels and narrow gorges. Ok i would expect it to do that but why then does it often show you miles away on the screen ? it knows you were on the road, it should know you were in a tunnel so why can it not just assume you are traveling along at a set speed on the same road. It can be very tricky when there is a junction just outside the tunnel as all routing is lost once it loses the sat signal and you just hope it gets it back quickly the other side. And why on earth does it not have toll booths shown on the maps ? a pretty important feature in my opinion, and would be very useful to know ones coming up so you can can get ready but nothing at all is shown. You can configure the side bar to show what's ahead. Its useful but why not somehow indicate if the petrol station for examlpe up ahead is on your route or off it ? you think one is coming up in a mile or so but in then disappears off the screen is it turns out its a few streets away and not on your actual route, not very helpful. Again tomtom does this better with on route and off route searching. Traffic warningsthese seem to work but as is often the case with such things they are usually a bit behind and hold ups and gone before you get there. Several dire warnings driving down through france of 90 min delays were ignored by me and traffic was heavy but moving and any delay was minimal, nothing like that predicted. No doubt not the fault of garmin that, but just a general warning on taking advice on such route diversions. Bluetooth. A bit disappointed that it will sync with my old nokia phone but not read the phonebook, so not much use for dialing out. Its strange because my old phone works fine in my audi with its own bluetooth it reads my phone book with no problem. Screen and instructions etc. I like the photo real junctions, lots of them on motorways across uk and europe, they do help. Lane guidance when you get it also helps. On occasions however especially on some roundabouts the arrow on the screen seems a bit fat and you lose clarity on the actual direction you need to go. It would be great to get an overview map of your route and progress along it with one touch, you can get it but it takes multiples screen touches to do it. I can't comment much on the voice instructions as most of my use has been in an open top car, and it not easy to hear them with the wind noise, and anyway i tend to rely on the screen by habitscreen attachment. Works fine for the most part but i have noticed you can get vibration through the car that will make the unit vibrate as well for a few seconds, (and that's worse in a sports car with stiff suspension) so mount not that solid, and if you are a bit heavy handed when pressing the screen the unit can move on the ball joint. Garmin basecamp. I have tried to use this to do routes on the pc but have found it very frustrating and fiddly to use and gave up. Tyre was a lot better and easy to set up waypoints to then create routes using that. Garmin casebought the genuine case as well. Nice and easy to use but does not fully enclose the unit as side are elasticated so i dropped it, and unit still got a dent on the corner, another garmin disappointment. So there you go. I did plan to send it back after it let me down but its been fairly good since then. But overall i am a disappointed garmin customer and wondering if i should have just forked out for new europe maps for my old faithful tomtom and saved a bit of cash!.
Product Info
- Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 1.9 x 13.7 cm ; 186 g
- Boxed-product Weight: 458 g
- Batteries 1 Lithium ion batteries required. (included)
- Item model number: 010-01123-29
- ASIN: B00AXX0JNW
Conclusion of Garmin nuvi 2577LT 5" Sat Nav
Purchased the week prior to going on holiday to the states, just in time to downloaded updated us maps, which did take a few hours but was well worth it. Sat nav worked minutes after arriving and got us everywhere we asked it to, and even round a diverted route owing to a road closure. The garmin was a replacement for a tom tom which we had purchased a couple of weeks prior but which wouldn't let us load up us maps. I've owned many garmin devices in the past but never a dedicated car 'satnav' - previously used an old garmin oregon which must be about 10 years old now (also own treking/outdoor hand-held garmin devices). This garmin (2597lmt) was a fantastic update: clear display, 3d maps, voice directions and easy destination entry.
Whilst en route, the 'up ahead' feature showed fuel, toilets and refreshments on the journey and the traffic delays were updated as we went (with the option to re-route to avoid). We bought this to replace our old garmin as we were about to go to poland, by road, for the first time. The only negative is that it sees delays on the route (anywhere on the 12 hour route) and asks you if you would like to take an alternative route. Brilliant sat nav, very fast, instant re-routes, clear display and good mapping. My sat nav came with maps pre-installed, but i did refresh them with a free update soon after purchase, this probably was not necessary but did it as it was a free update.
The whole process including updating all maps took under an hour, and could be left unattended while it updated. Voice recognition is mostly excellent; you can speak the menu and easily select your menu options and get to the maps by voice control. Live traffic connects ok with power lead supplied, but has not shown any traffic warning information during first three weeks of use, but perhaps this is just lucky because i live in the countryside and have not been on any very heavily congested roads recently. Speed camera alerts are good, there are very clear visual and audible warnings for most of the likely locations, but be warned just a few established locations are missing. I subscribed to camera updates (only an annual subscription available for uk at about £16), now wish i had not bothered as so far it has made no difference, just as well have stayed with the pre-installed camera alerts.
I was disapopointed that some of the potentially very useful app feature on the phone such as parking, safety cameras, live traffic all needed additional subscriptions even though my satnav came with lifetime map updates and traffic. I have lots of reservations however about this garmin not least of all was it failure to work properly after a couple of hours down the french motorway on day 1 of the two week drive through europe for which i had specifically bought it (i had previously done a trip to scotland and the west country and it was fine then) . The unit froze on us whilst driving and then having switched off would not restart it just kept cycling through a start up screen and then off again, and no amount of button pushing would stop it. I want to see the current time, the distance and time to my destination all at a glance, tomtom does it, garmin needs more presses of the screen to get all that. You should not need to touch the unit to get something as basic as the current time up.
Update, this model now has all the info on the screen you need, a software update put that right a few months ago. Tomtom warms about toll roads etc when it plans a route, garmin doesn't. And the overview map that shows mountains etc is a great way to get a feel for your trip and its then possibly to zoom right into the details of the route. Several times garmin has tried to take me off motorways for no apparent reason, or cut corners in small villages to take you down bumpy narrow back roads where its way better to carry on through on the main road. This garmin also has no option to set a route for walking, my old tomtom did, and so do older garmins so why not this one?.
It knows you were on the road, it should know you were in a tunnel so why can it not just assume you are traveling along at a set speed on the same road. Again tomtom does this better with on route and off route searching. No doubt not the fault of garmin that, but just a general warning on taking advice on such route diversions. It would be great to get an overview map of your route and progress along it with one touch, you can get it but it takes multiples screen touches to do it. Works fine for the most part but i have noticed you can get vibration through the car that will make the unit vibrate as well for a few seconds, (and that's worse in a sports car with stiff suspension) so mount not that solid, and if you are a bit heavy handed when pressing the screen the unit can move on the ball joint.
Nice and easy to use but does not fully enclose the unit as side are elasticated so i dropped it, and unit still got a dent on the corner, another garmin disappointment. But overall i am a disappointed garmin customer and wondering if i should have just forked out for new europe maps for my old faithful tomtom and saved a bit of cash. Well i was afraid it wouldn't do all the things i wanted it to, but it does and does so much more besides. It even remembers your favourite searches and places and next time they're just there waiting to be selected, it searches very quickly, it changes your route very quickly if you divert or miss a turn, and on the odd occasion there was traffic trouble it came up on the display. The 7 inch display is very clear and easy to use, and using the garmin universal dash mount (which is great too) you can place it in just the optimum position for un-obstructive yet easy glancing viewing. Its powered by a thicj cable from the cigarette lighter socket that also doubles as the traffic warning news aerial, so thats a little messy to sort out, but soon got used to it, especially as the device works so well and you start to fall in love with it.
There is a little downside to it though, i found when in city centres and you approach very complex junctions, the car symbol can move a little too slowly and you think its pointing to one road when in fact it wants you on another, so i did miss a road or two, but that could be my error, but it soon re-calculates and gets you back on track again, in seconds. The other gripe was the traffic service, which did not warn of a major snarl up around a huge roundabout in preston that was being 'improved', hah, the works had clearly been going on for weeks and the traffic was backed up all over the place (had two major roads and motorway junction to sort out there), and yet it was not aware and so did not avoid the area, we drove straight in to the chaos. Unit and menusthe unit is strong and light - nice to hold, good quality. A glance at the unit will tell you the type of junction and how far to go - but be warned that you may pass many junctions and signs before that (that you are meant to take no action at). In the modern world there are often roads at freeway speeds and yet complex city junctions with fly-overs tunnels and so on.
The map does not help as it is too confusing to match what you see on the road in the split-second you have to decide what to do. You need the 'map' of the roundabout before you get to it, but the `birds eye' view is too `wide' and the road representation is too thick on screen relative to reality. The destination (waypoint) is all that matters to the unit (whereas planning on basecamp allows you to choice the exact roads you drive down). But it is still hard to make it choose a route you want - a route selector is available if there are multiple possibilities but often there is only one option. You cannot modify a route on the unit (in terms of the roads used).
Road options - i switched 'unpaved ' option off but it still took us down this type of road . It takes you down impossibly small roads, through villages and housing estates instead of the main road, and tries to take you down tiny lanes that are dead ends or private/residential. The mapping is comprehensive but the people who code the algorithms for driving seem to have very small 4x4s and no regard for the privacy of land - and expect you to drive your shiny hire car (for instance) down a narrow lane with thorn bushes either side - just to save 30 seconds on the route. Rerouting - a major problem in the real world is also that the unit doesn't tell you when you are going wrong but simply recalculates - this is good for wandering around where you don't care what road you are on - but in many cases you simply want to turn round and regain the route that you planned - not an alternative. Long story short you still need to study a map and know your route by heart if you want to stay on the most efficient route (i.
Darkening Screen. Just back from a tour around andalucia in spain. The satnav got me to my hotels ok, however, the main problem is the screen kept going from full on to dark screen, even although you could barely see it, it was still working in the background (my wife held it in her hand for the whole journey so she could tell me up coming distances to turnings. I'm sure there must be a setting that i cannot find, yet, to change this. I'll need to read the instruction book. The screen shot shown is not what i have on my satnav. I did not like the fact it didn't show the overall distance to the destination. I had uploaded the latest maps the first day i got it, however, it did not have the "new" road into malaga airport, albeit it got me to the lead up to it and i just had to follow the signs. I'm sure i'll get the hang of it. .
A Change Is As Good As a Rest?. As a former tom tom owner of a few years standing now, and having to regularly update my maps, and speed camera warnings was proving to be an expensive annual on-cost. As my current device was getting a little long in the tooth along with one or two niggles that were proving to be ever more annoying, i decided to cut my losses, and make a change. I chose this garmin, mainly for the free lifetime map upgrades promised. Oh yeah? when things appear too good to be true they usually are. However this offer turns out to be genuine. But be advised that the traffic warning facility that comes as standard is only rudimentary. Its only early days yet, but if you are familiar with tom toms you will discover that garmins are a very different concept altogether. Mine has taken some getting used to, but i think i am on top of it now. In many ways this system can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. As a self-confessed gadget freak i marvel that for a single life-time fee of £15. 49 i have an agreeable traffic warning system. Another £15. 49 gave me a single life-time speed camera warning feature with regular updates. For additional single lifetime fees i can be given local parking facilities, and the prices; even weather conditions over my target. Of course these are additional costs that might put a new user off, but when you eventually get used to this marvellous box of tricks that gets to know you and your vehicle, and your driving habits better than you do, it can be a little disturbing as it is impressive. You can even get a free app for your smart-phone to use as a remote control. The inbuilt bluetooth gives you freedom to make and receive phone calls using your garmin as a loudspeaker where reception is acceptable even in a noisy motor in a sort of hands-free situation. If you get your settings right it will even tell you everything about your journey down to how much fuel you've consumed, and how much it cost you. Like i wrote earlier, you can make this garmin as simple or as complex as you want it to be. I might like to have jodrell bank on my dashboard, but the missus wants it plain and simple and not taking up too much space that could be otherwise be better occupied by a cuddly toy. In conclusion: the tom tom is in the glover locker, and the garmin sits smugly on the dashboard. What does that tell you?.
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