Has anybody had experience with the new Garmin Zumo? It seems like it has lots of features that would be great on the bike, but it looks like they only have maps of North America and Europe available for it. What I find appealing includes the big screen with glove-friendly buttons, waterproof case, MP3 player, XM traffic and weather and Bluetooth compatability.

So I hate to admit this, but I have never had a GPS before. It's not that I'm afraid of technology, it just that I know as soon as I cross that threshold I suddenly won't be able to function without it (like fuel guages and XM radio). Now I'm planning a lot more traveling in other countries, and it's time to make the leap.

Any input from those more experienced with GPS? Does the Zumo look like it has good potential for international travel? Are maps usually available from other sources for other countries? How does the GPS function if you don't have a corresponding map module loaded, or does it work at all? Is there another model that you think would be better suited to international travel? Are there other models that have the same features I like that has more maps available? I've also been looking at the Street Pilot 2820.

Any help you can provide would be much appreciated!

Don't think the Zumo will be available until October, so it'll probably be a while before we get any feed back. I purchased a Nuvi 350 earlier this year for my trip to TDF. It will translate lanquages and do currency exchange, and has mp3. It's small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and has battery back up. The downside, it's not waterproof, the Zumo is.

Harold

Ahhh, yes. On further investigation, it seems that all the websites do, in fact, say "Coming Soon". So easy to overlook in all the excitement.

OK, so I won't expect too many first-hand reviews, but does anybody have any thoughts on what I should be looking for? I don't want to drop a thousand bucks and find that it's lacking in some critical area - especially if someone else has already lived & learned!

The garmin quest is a good water proof option for bikes. I like mine (quest1). It's nice and small and has very good battery life. I've yet to get the cable to power it from the bike but it will happily direct you for 6-8 hours on a charge and recharge within an hour or so.

Down sides are the buttons aren't very easy with big gloves on and the way you key in addresses is a bit fiddly (not the fancy touch screen system the zumo and nuvi have).

The european version comes with complete maps of the uk and western europe. I've heard people say you can get a quest 1 for £150. I've never seen them at that price. Paid £299 for mine about 4 or 5 months ago.

The Quest 2 is newer has more memory and postcode searching within the same basic shell. You'll have to add costs for a bike mount and power cables to what you pay for either quest.

Zumo is clearly Garmin's response to the TomTom rider. I have heard pretty poor reports on the Rider though, saying the quality of the bike mount, bluetooth system and headset is poor.

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KTM supermoto
BMW R1100GS
"tourer in waiting"

Great! That gives me some good info to work with.

One more thing - I keep reading posts from people who are disappointed at the lack of memory. I know the definition of a "good" amount of memory changes from day to day (my computer had great memory just a year ago) but what should I reasonably be looking for?

Not really sure but by way of example with the quest 1 i don't think you can get all the maps of Europe and the UK on it at once, but you can with the quest 2.

but in most cases it wouldn't matter as you can simply select the maps you're likely to need and transfer them from your PC onto the GPS. So if you were going south through Europe you could deselect all of north UK, north europe, etc so they don't take up memory.

Unless you were going on a long long trip covering every corner of europe or further afield chances are the quest 1 has enough memory to hold the maps you'll need.

The zumo like some other models has a SD card slot so you can expand the memory/carry extra maps on spare cards.

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KTM supermoto
BMW R1100GS
"tourer in waiting"

Isn't XM Radio a North American thing only? Perhaps Europe too? Different satellites, and while GPS satellites cover the globe, XM radio has limited coverage?

Same for weather radio. While there is weather everywhere - what weather radio signal does this unit pull in? And is the forecast in a language you can understand?

So, if my assumptions are correct, its a great device for the North American/European market, but it might have a bunch of useless features outside those areas.

So I'm just asking - not familiar enough with the technology to know if I'm posting dumb comments.

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quastdog
Chiang Mai, Thailand

Yes, XM only works in North America. The primary reason I like those features is for my Iron Butt runs in the US and Canada - anything that can help me re-route around bad weather or traffic without having to pull over and yank out the maps is a real plus. So I don't mind that those features don't work out of this continent, but if nothing functions well anywhere else it's a whole different story.