Best deals Garmin Zumo 665LM, only for a limited time Click Here
Garmin is a company that has a good reputation in the manufacture of navigation, particularly navigation digital map products. Garmin Zumo 665LM Review - Customer satisfaction is a reference to assess the product. Below you can read honest reviews of customers who have purchased a Garmin Zumo 665LM.
Garmin Zumo 665LM Review, Honest Customer Reviews
Garmin Zumo 665LM Review, It appears that the 665LM is through it's growing pains
By Patrick L. Pemberton (Fairmount, IN USA)
Garmin Zumo 665LM GPS Motorcycle Navigator
For you best deals Garmin Zumo 665LM, only for a limited time - to avoid disappointment.
After getting many strong hints from me, my wife purchased a Garmin Zumo 665LM for my birthday in April of 2013. That was after she had told me that she had considered getting one for me for Christmas of 2012, but stopped after reading all of the negative reviews of the unit. Having had many Garmins before and loving each of them, I told her that I wanted to try one anyway.
I must say, I have noted that there are a lot of negative reviews out there. There are complaints about units being DOA or breaking after a very short period. Lots of horror stories. However, the other thing I noticed was that all of the reviews were back in the early period of the 665's release. It obviously went through some very bad growing pains.
I can tell you that, at least based on the performance of my unit, the growing pains seem to be over and Garmin appears to have this unit ironed out. Now, that's not to say that it is perfect and that I don't have my nits about it, but for the most part, it has been my experience that the 665LM works pretty much as advertised.
In fact, instead of talking about what I like about the unit (which is a LOT), I will tell you the things about it that either you need to know, or that I do not like. For a baseline, I am coming off of a Garmin Nuvi 550, which is another outdoor waterproof GPS from Garmin that I used on my motorcycle for years, and loved.
- 1) Screen brightness- If you read the Garmin hype, you will be lead to believe that you can see the screen under all sunny conditions. This just isn't so. It IS somewhat better than my 550, but it can still be flushed out by direct sunlight. As an accessory to my birthday gift, my sister-in-law bought me a "Glare Stomper 320 Sun Shade Visor" to Velcro around the edge of the GPS. While it is not a perfect solution, it does help. But ultimately, under certain sunny conditions I still have to angle the 665 into funny positions and strain my eyes in order to see it. This is the exception and not the norm. But I've yet to see a GPS where you didn't have to do this in the sunlight.
- 2) The "hockey puck" antenna- This is something to be very aware of if you plan to use your Zumo 665LM and the XM radio in multiple vehicles. The XM radio receiver IS IN THE ANTENNA! That is why the antenna is so big (and hard to find a good place for on a motorcycle). The GPS itself really only serves as the head to the XM system. This means that if you have the idea of purchasing a second antenna and permanently installing one in your vehicle and one on your motorcycle, realize that you are really buying another XM receiver (with a different ID) and will need TWO XM subscriptions! I was going to do that until I learned this. So unless you want to pay for two subscriptions, you have to lug both the GPS and the antenna between vehicles, which of course also affects how you install the antenna in each.
- 3) Rebooting- Some of the complaints about the 665 were stray reboots. It has been my experience with every Garmin that I or family members have that every rare now and then, they reboot mysteriously. Based on the early complaints mentioned above, this seemed to really be a bad problem with the 665. Now, I can't say this hasn't happened to my unit, but since I received it in April (it's now September), this has only happened two or maybe three times. This seems to be about the norm for Garmins, so I don't consider this too big of an issue. It's not gone, but it's not a plaguing problem either.
- 4) MP3 player- This has probably been the biggest disappointment for me on the 665. It has an MP3 player built in to it. You just pop in a MicroSD card with your MP3 songs on it (It also recognized Apple's M4A format, which I was pleased to see. Not sure about Windows MWA.) But there are a couple of issues I have with the MP3 player.
- 5) MP3 player issue #1- Since the 665 is a somewhat older design (I believe about 3 years at this point), it appears to be geared towards MicroSD card sizes of that day (probably 4-8 Gb). I have a TON of music in digital format (to the tune of about 130 Gb), so I bought a 64 Gb card and loaded it up with music to keep in the GPS. While the GPS did recognize the card and ultimately was able to play the music, the amount of data clearly overwhelmed the unit and made it unacceptably slow. I'm not just talking about playing music either. Every time I turned the unit on, it took it somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to boot up fully to work at all, even GPS activities. I tested this by removing the card and the unit would work fine. But when it was loaded with that much music, the unit was pretty much unusable. I now have a 32 Gb card in the unit and about 20 Gb of songs loaded. This still hogs the unit to a degree when booting up. It takes it about 1-2 minutes now, but I consider that a trade-off for having that much music on board. Once it is up, it seems to work fine.
- 6) MP3 player issue #2- The functionality of the MP3 player is really pretty archaic. I'm used to an iPod, which is on the other end of functionality when it comes to playing music. I'm here to tell you, the MP3 player on the 665 is pretty bad when you are accustomed to iPod functionality. First of all, there is no "queue" per say. I mean, there is a queue of course, but with an iPod, you can have your queue going and be browsing your songs/albums/artists/playlists. When you see something you like, you can just add it to the queue and it will play when the time comes. With the 665, you cannot edit or add to the running queue. If you find a song you want to hear and select it, it IMMEDIATLY dumps whatever is playing (the ENTIRE current queue, with no way to get it back) and starts playing the song you just selected. Also, if you pick a song to play in the 665, that is it. It plays the song and then just sits there and looks at you. The iPod is smart enough to know that you probably want to hear SOMETHING after your selected song finishes and will go on to another song. It is really frustrating if you want to select some songs you are in the mood for. (There is no capability like the iPod "Genius" function either.) Finding individual songs and playing them are extremely hard with this interface. I have found the best thing to do is to either create playlists beforehand or to play albums or artists. Really, there are only two advantages to playing the 665 MP3 player over my iPod on the motorcycle. First is that you can see/control what songs are playing in the display, and second is that you can still hear the navigation and phone announcements over the music when using the 665 player.
In the big picture, I love the Garmin Zumo 665 LM and like I said, have not talked about all of the features that I really do like. This review would be WAY longer then. If you are looking for the functionality that it has to offer, I highly recommend it. Like I said before, based on my unit, it appears that they are through the growing pains and now have made it a viable, multi-function GPS. Good job, Garmin!