Zumo 350 long review

[barrkel]

The weekend before last, just as I was going down the A12 on the start of wander around Essex, my old Zumo 550 tumbled out of its mount and got squished under a car. I had unwittingly popped open the locking lever a few moments earlier, and a bump in the road knocked it out. I put about 35k on its odometer, in both Europe and the US, so I knew it well.

After a bit of research, I ordered the Zumo 350LM (LM=lifetime maps). It's a newer model than the Zumo 660, and it has almost all the same features, except for MP3 playback and phone bluetooth pairing. The styling is a bit closer to the old 550 too, with rubberized back and sides, rather than the smooth plastic of the 660.

The device is wider but shallower than the 550, and about the same weight, perhaps slightly lighter. The battery is not removable, but it does last longer, and the voice synthesis works without hardwired power.

The mount is a bit better, I will tentatively say. I went through 3 mounts for the 550; on one, the pins on the locking piece snapped from vibration wear, and on another, water got into it and fried the circuitry inside it - probably because the RAM mounting bracket was bolted on slightly too tightly, so the plastic eventually cracked.

The new mount's locking lever is off to the side and around the back of the device, so it's less likely to be popped open by a cuff when reaching past the device - the cause of death of my 550.

The new mount has no electronics, just two power pins (actually on the power cable) connecting to two copper discs on the back of the 350. The 350 takes 5v power, and the transformer for this is embedded in the power cable itself - it converts 10v..30v to 5v. This also means extra cables for extra bikes is more expensive.

The way the cable locks into the mount has changed too. The cable needs to be threaded through the mount before the RAM bracket is bolted to the back of the mount, and so detaching the cable needs a spanner and screwdriver. Since the cable is normally routed along the frame all the way to the battery with cable ties etc., this means the mount cannot be removed from the bike easily if you're using hard-wired power. I plan to snip the cable and use a superseal connector to make the mount portable, as I believe leaving a GPS mount attached to my scooter parked up in the city is going to prompt thieves to break into my seat / topbox looking for the corresponding device. This should also save me having to buy multiple mounts, and multiple RAM brackets, one for each bike.

On to the software. The UI is a bit different than the 550, the speed is a little smaller, but the dashboard is configurable and something acceptable is reasonably easy to choose. Changing things like the screen brightness is a bit dangerous on the move, whereas I could do it blindly on the 550 with its hardware buttons. The lane assist / junction view is a nice addition for the rare times I'm on motorways going through complex chain of junctions, where it can save a lot of time should you take a wrong turning. The speed limit indicators are more often wrong than right in Essex, where many NSL roads have been changed to 50 and 40, and some 40s have become 30s. But the passive navigation UI is generally fine.

Now, routing. I generally used my 550 in three ways: navigation to known addresses, preplanned routes and ad-hoc routes. Navigation to known addresses works perfectly fine, little different than the 550 or indeed any phone app or cheap GPS. If this is all you need a GPS for, the Zumo is overkill and probably not worth it.

Preplanned routes were generally done in Tyre because it has easy export to both Garmin and TomTom - my GF has a TT Rider 2. Preplanned routes work just about as well as the 550, though they are slightly more involed to get to, you need to tap through 'Apps', then 'Trip Planner', before you can access the route - it's not on the same screen as 'Go To', and it took me a few dozen Google searches to find it.

Ad-hoc routing is significantly worse than the 550 for my use pattern, though. The way I'd do it on the 550 is:

1. choose a final destination
   
2. let the device plot the route
   
3. examine the route in the overhead north-up view
   
4. are any bendy roads visible parallel to route?
   
5. if not, stop fiddling with GPS and ride
   
6. otherwise, add a via point to force navigation to choose that road
   
7. go to step 2

On the 350, there are problems with steps 3 (north up view of route) and 6 (adding a via point). On the 550, tapping the map would transfer from 3D view (the default) to north-up overhead view. Then the physical + / - buttons could be used to zoom, tap and drag to pan, tap to place a marker, and Go to add as a via point.

On the 350, tapping the map transfers to a slightly zoomed out 3D view, and needs an extra tap on a soft button to go to north-up overhead view. There are no physical buttons other than the power button, and the soft + / - zoom buttons fade out after a delay of about 2 seconds, often less than the redraw time of the map. Tapping the map to get the buttons back also selects a point, and a second new behaviour, auto-centring, pans the map to the location of the selected point. This means that zooming in or out often means randomly panning around the map, and makes zooming in on a small narrow area an exercise in frustration. And when panning around the map, it's advisable to leave your finger on the screen a bit longer than necessary, otherwise it might interpret the swipe as a point selection and pan somewhere else entirely.

Further problems arise when trying to add a via point. Instead of the device figuring out the optimal navigation order to insert the new point, it dumps you in the route point ordering dialog, and you need to sort it yourself manually, tediously dragging it into place in a list where you can only see 3 other points at a time. And since the intermediate points are typically chosen because of their locations on bendy roads, you have no idea where to insert the new point - the list is full of addresses you don't recognize.

So ad-hoc route planning is a bit of a disaster on the new device, to the point that doing it efficiently requires a pen and paper to keep track of which via points go where. The route can be reordered optimally, but that requires going all the way to the top-level menu, then down through Apps / Trip Planner / Active Route / Edit / Optimal Reorder, then all the way back up to the top-level menu and back into the map view, then back into north-up overhead view, then zoom out until you can see the whole route again - way, way too many steps to be efficient for an interactive loop.

I suspect the people at Garmin who designed the software have never actually used it on a bike. They are completely obsessed with addresses and points, whereas people who ride bikes are far more concerned with roads and routes. I'd like to see a feature where you could upload thousands or tens of thousands of routes ("recommended rides") into the device, and have the device have an interactive dialog for stringing together these routes when navigating.

There are a few new features that I appreciate though. Breadcrumbs - the route you've ridden since the GPS was turned on, roughly speaking - can be turned into a route. So if you get lost and find some good roads, you can more easily turn it into a route, rather than having to remember to plug the device into a PC, load the trip, and convert it into a route there. Similarly, the Active Route can now be saved. So if you can cope with the hassle of designing a semi-decent ad-hoc route, you can now save it and ride it again much more easily.

Overall it's a mixed bag. For the same price I paid (300 GBP), I would have been happy with a box-fresh Zumo 550, but I was not willing to buy a second-hand one for the asking prices on ebay (200..250 GBP), even though I had all the accessories and bikes pre-wired. I plan on keeping the 350 until the successor to the 660 comes out - it's a bit long in the tooth now - and then possibly sell it and upgrade in the hope that my spamming of Garmin's suggestion box has borne fruit.
____________________
Bikes: S1000R, SH350; Exes: Vity 125, PS125, YBR125, ER6f, VFR800, Brutale 920, CB600F, SH300x4
Best road ever ridden: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2MhNxUEYtQ

[Skudd]

I like the hard wire bit of my Zumo and would want that again if I was to renew. I also like the music bit as this is what I use most of the time for most of my journeys.
____________________
Famous last words of Humpty Dumpty. " Stop pushing me "
Petty Anarchists look at "1984".............. The Visionary looks at "Animal Farm".

[Walloper]

[Skudd]

When my 450 went FUBAR I sent it away to a guy on the internet who fixed it all for £60. Might be able to sort your 550.
____________________
Famous last words of Humpty Dumpty. " Stop pushing me "
Petty Anarchists look at "1984".............. The Visionary looks at "Animal Farm".

[Walloper]

[Skudd]

I can't find the emails for the guy I used , but there are plenty if you Google.
____________________
Famous last words of Humpty Dumpty. " Stop pushing me "
Petty Anarchists look at "1984".............. The Visionary looks at "Animal Farm".

[Skudd]

[Walloper]

[Skudd]

[Polarbear]

Tomtom, I prefer it all the way. I know it's horses for courses, but that would be my choice.
____________________
Triumph Trophy Launch Edition

[Skudd]