Re: Garmin 2720 reviews?

I spent an hour playing around with the Garmin 2720 on display at a local
Best Buy. I currently use a 2610. Here's my comparison.

First the speaker was not hooked up on the unit I played with, so I can't
comment on the new text to speech. Nor was the GMT-10 traffic info device
hooked up so I can't comment on that. And of course there were no "custom"
POIs installed. Routing tests were via the driving simulator -- Find and Go
To with the GPS off -- using Detour to go off route and then forcing a new
route calculation. I'll have to assume that, as with the 2610, performance
would not be significantly affected by GPS processing in real use.

The display seemed quite good. The touch screen accuracy also seemed quite
good.

The performance for finds and routing seemed similar to the 2610 --
essentially instantaneous for nearby stuff and "fast enough" for distant
stuff.

The menu structure is different but seems to work intuitively. The PDF of
the user manual can be downloaded from the Garmin site if you want to see.
As usual, Garmin doesn't go into all the details in the user manual for the
configuration options -- for which see below.

I spotted one improvement I've been asking for since the 2610 came out. The
Auto-Zoom function can now be set to a user chosen max value. It still
zooms all the way in as you approach a turn, but when you leave a turn it
will zoom out no farther than the selected max value rather than zooming out
far enough to show both your current location and the next turn. Set it to,
say 5 Miles and it won't auto zoom out beyond the 5 Mile scale even if your
next turn is 50 miles away -- thus you avoid unreadable map scale settings
after a turn. The "Auto" setting gives the option of working as in the
2610.

The 2D track up and track North displays work as in the 2610. The 3D
display is visually interesting, but at first blush seems more confusing
than helpful. It might seem better with practice, and of course with the
aid of the voice prompts.

The big problem I found is in the configuration of the data tabs displayed
with the map. First of all, there's no way to set the data tabs to
"transparent", so whatever screen real estate is taken up by data reduces
the visible map area. I can only assume they did that to speed up the map
drawing time.

Second, there's no easy way to dismiss the data tabs from the map display if
you'd like to see more map temporarily. Third, the configuration options
are limited. There is a "Normal" display which apparently is NOT
configurable, although it shows different data when routing or when driving
without a route active. This is the configuration shown in the screen
shots.

The customizable alternatives are "Wide" or "Narrow" and the choice affects
all data fields for both routing and driving without an active route. As
with the 2610 you have up to 4 data tabs in a column on the right, and you
can select which pre-formatted data you want in each tab -- with some
choices taking up 2 tabs vertically. But ALL the tabs for routing and
non-routing will ALL be either wide or narrow, and with no transparency.
Thus if you select wide tabs, the displayed map is kind of tiny.

I've gotten used to being able to use the full width of the 2610 to see maps
when I want, so to me this is a real gotcha in the 2720.

And apparently the line of text across the top of the map -- as shown in the
screen shots -- only exists in the non-configurable "Normal" mode.

Let's see. The info screen displayed for a found item now has text on the
right and the map area including the item on the left. This is good.

Text displayed on the map seems to be more readable than with the 2610.
This may be due to the enhanced resolution or just better fonts.

Performance for dragging the 2D map screen around, and precision of touch
selection of a feature on the map both seem better than with the 2610.

That's it for now.
--Bob


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