Garmin DriveSmart 50LMT-D Satellite Navigation with Full Europe Lifetime Maps and Traffic, 5 inch - Black

First impressions were very positive. Looked good and set up easily. Upon trying it locally I instantly had an issue with it seemingly going mute. I tried to use voice command and this was also not working. Managed to turn it off but took 5mins to turn back on. Sound now working again for about 20 seconds. I'm now contemplating returning the unit and going over to the Tom Tom side.... got a long journey coming up. Will be the deciding vote!!! As they say time will tell.Long Trip... after everything working well, got over the mute bit by changing power save option from 2 mins to Never...Route told me to take a road. When I took said road it told me I was on the wrong road?? Went back other way and added 25mins to journey!! Bit annoying. Turn Right?? Left turn only!!!Mostly was very good though.Yes I would recommend this product... keeping mine as it's no worse than any others I've used 😎

Great GPS - nice clear screen and easy to use menus. Only criticisms are that the traffic service may need a subscription (need to figure that out still) and the GPS routing isn't as good as Google Maps! But this is definitely worth it driving around the UK where mobile reception is terrible. The lane images to help navigate freeway turnoffs etc works really well. Also, the warnings for speed zones and speed cameras is surprisingly accurate. This is a great option for longer drives and when you don't want to use and drain your phone, or if reception is out.

Needs refining. Very limited. You can choose motorways or no motorways but I was driving from Margate to Aberystwyth and was happy to use the M2 and M4 but not the M25. You can't specify so either you do the lot on normal roads or you keep stopping to set up your route in separate sections.On the fifth day of using it, it just seized up for no apparent reason. Stopped tracking me and stopped giving me instructions. it didn't respond to voice command. Pulled up and tried turning it off but nothing happened. Frozen screen. Held power button down for about 15 secs but still the same. Pulled plug and after about 10 secs it finally went off. Had to re-programme the route again, and when I set off it was not keeping up with me, even though it said it had recalculated 100%. Was telling me to do things that I did 2 junctions ago.Recharge cable pathetically short.Doesn't pronounce places very well, even well known obvious places.You tell it to take you to a town but you have to tell it a street name, or else it won't do it. If I don't know the town and don't have mobile internet on me, I won't know any street names or road numbers. So you click any old letter and choose a random street name but it might be away on a side of that town that you don't want to be in. Why can't I just say 'take me to, say, Bogtown?So, all in all, I think in about 10 years when they have properly refined these, they might be really good. As for now, it'll do, so long as it doens't just turn off mid journey. .

This is my third Garmin, the previous two both became faulty after two years or less and with the rate that this technology is evolving, it simply wasn't worth paying around 75% of the original price for Garmin to fix them. My wife had recently bought a TomTom Go 5100 and I used that for a while whilst considering what to do next. I was reluctant to buy another Garmin, their customer service is a joke, and I think that this sort of consumer electronic device should last more than 2 years; either that or reduce the price to say £50 and then you'd get what you paid for. Having used Garmin for so long I just couldn't get on with the TomTom, despite the fact that its on board SIM powered traffic seemed to be better than the Garmin DAB/FM offering. There seemed to be some doubt about whether I would have to pay for using data via SmartLink to my phone and Garmin sales couldn't answer that question. I was about to drive across Europe to Crete for the winter so this was quite important for me.The setup seemed to go OK although the update of the maps etc, as usual despite my 40Mb internet connection, it took ages; I do wish that Garmin would do something about this!! I was able to transfer all my favourites from my 2595 easily once I had found out how, which was not very intuitive.There is only a paper quick start guide, the rest of the manual is online, although you can download it. One of my gripes about the Garmin web site is the fact that it keeps sending you to the US site and a lot of the information on that site is incorrect for UK devices.In use it is very similar to the LM2595LMT that it replaced. The traffic worked right across Europe which surprised me as Garmin themselves didn't know whether it would when I asked their sales dept. It relies on DAB radio transmissions, which are not available everywhere, in France I found that there was no reception on long stretches of motorway between towns. We ran my wife's TomTom at the same time to compare the performance. Generally speaking the TomTom seemed to report traffic and roadworks more quickly, but didn't work of course in the areas with no mobile phone signal; this is a much smaller problem in Europe than in th UK. Route changes due to traffic or roadworks can be either automatic or manual, The Garmin sometimes changes your route only to find that the traffic or roadworks on the alternative route are little better and if you are out on a bank holiday these constant changes can result in huge detours that don't save you any time. It never seems to get to the point where it re evaluates the route to your destination and picks the best compromise, it just keeps adding local detours. The TomToms avoidance algorithm seems to work better as it does display roadworks or traffic nearby rather than just the route you are on. The maps and detail are good, one thing I did notice was that if you select "avoid un-paved roads" for instance it also removes those roads from the map display. I've not checked whether if you select "avoid motorways" it also removes them from the display!!The trip planning app is great, I was able to plan the various phases of my trip across Europe in advance, so I knew well in advance distances and times.The choice between fastest time and shortest distance can be very frustrating, in Italy for instance the fastest time on one route was deemed to be the shortest which took me on some very narrow twisty roads used by Italian wanna be rally drivers, in comparison with the other option which was some 15% further but in real time much faster and safer.My original LM265 seemed to have a much more sensible algorithm for this.Both the 50LMT-D and the 2595 have this annoying habit of indicating that driving 4 or 5 miles down a twisty single track side road to save maybe a mile or so over the main road route is a good trade off, which of course it isn't all things being equal, and this is when the navigation preference is set to "faster time" rather than "shorter distance". I have always found these algorithms questionable, try using a satnav to drive a local route you know well and you'll see what I mean. The TomTom was marginally better than this at times, but also suffered with some baffling route options.Which brings us to the DriveSmart part of the device. The speed limit warnings are useful when you have a lot to think about on a drive, and by and large they worked well, but they are of course solely dependant on the map updates. This particular feature is way off in Crete, frequently having me trundling along at 50KPH when then limit is actually 90KPH. I know that speed limits are maximums and not targets but with hidden speed cameras it's important not to get caught out.The bend warning is just a gimmick. Having descended some 20 hairpin bends on a road in Italy, I finally got a warning of a gentle 45˚ bend at the bottom of the hill!! You can turn the audible warning off but not the daft banner that flashes up at the top of the display.The animal crossing warning is scarily accurate, almost everytime a warning flashed up we passed a roadside warning sign soon after.There is no reverse route facilty on this, or many other Satnavs either as far as I can tell, but on my 2595 there was a facility to show where you had been, so reversing a route was easy enough, just follow the line on the map, no directions mind you but at least you had some idea. On the 50LMTD this facility only exists as an app and appears not to autoscroll as you drive, so it is basically useless.The other change for the worse from the 2595 is the Dashboard, as you can only display 2 pieces of data, one I always have set to speed whilst I'm abroad as the KPH markings on my speedo are very small, the other piece of data can display time to arrival, arrival time, distance to destination, time of day, elevation or one or two other variations on this; but you can only see one of these items whereas the 2595 you could show 5 of those pieces of data, why? Oh and by the way the elevation function seems to be off on mine by around 11 meters irrespective of which map datum I chose in the preferences. The older 2595 could be very accurate if you stopped in one place for a few moments.The speed of the data processing still leaves the display behind where you are, ok 90% of the time, but navigating through the twisty streets of smaller villages when the direction of the main road is not obvious, results in mistakes being made by me, even going slowly.The touch screen is much better than the resistive screen on my old model and it responds to gestures in much the same way as a smart phone.Will it last, I'll keep you posted. One weak point just as in the 2595 is the mini usb connector for power. These connectors were never designed to be constantly plugged and unplugged and I'm pretty sure that this was the problem with my old 2595.The TomTom solution of having the power go to the mount with a substantial connector for the device is likely to be more reliable long term, on the other hand at the time I bought the 50LMTD there was no air vent mount for the TomTom, which is my preferred location.On reading this back I wonder why I bought the Garmin, an almost £100 price difference was one reason, throwing away a £130 device is bad enough but a £250 device like the TomTom would be even worse, and from what other reviewers have observed, there is little to choose between them in terms of reliability.A an aside my Focus bought secondhand has a built in Satnav, which is actually not bad, but the last map update available for it is 2012, no speed camera warnings and ridiculously expensive updates anyway (as well as no coverage in Greece) mean that the really obvious solution is not much good at the moment. Why do car infotainment systems have such poor and expensive Satnavs? (The update for the maps on my mate's 55 plate BMW X5 are some £2k..... Yeah I know who'd want an X5 anyway :-) )Would I recommend this product? for long term Garmin users it's a good mid price choice, I doubt wether it will appeal to TomTom afficiondos. Garmin has the ability to use custom POIs, my work takes me all over the UK and having both Travis Perkin's and Screwfix's depots is useful. The directions given are clear and in good time. The voice control is like most other car based voice control systems, flakey. I have not used the bluetooth connection for my phone as that is routed via my car Bluetooth. So a mixed bag really, on reflection I might have been better just getting used to TomTom's way of doing things.Neither the TomTom Go nor the Garmin 50LMTD are particularly spectacular, the newer style touch screens being the biggest benefit. It does feel as if both companies are looking for something new to attract buyers and upgraders, but the reality is they are in danger of losing sight of the prime purpose of a SatNav, namely to get you to your destination in a timely fashion and be easy to operate.15/4/2017OK so here's an update after 6 months in Crete. First off if you are searching for a particular destination even if you enter it in English the way it is spelt on the device the search often fails, so you wind up moving around the map screen to find your destination. OK if you know roughly where you are going but for unknown ones, useless.Next that routing algorithmn, still very annoying. The roads in Crete have improved immeasureably since I first came here in the 70s but this device still manages to take me down unpaved roads even with that option disabled.The major problem though as ever with Garmin devices is the updates. As I've been here 6 months now and am just about to head for home, Like a fool I decided to update the maps before I left. For once everything seemed to go OK, just for a change I didn't have to update the Garmin Express app before it started the update, after 3.5 hours it said it was complete and to eject it from my laptop and restart it. This I did, it even told me what had been updated, but...... Once it had acquired the satellites the map of Crete was just a rough outline and the only road showing was the main E65. I thought OK maybe it had forgotten which country it was in, so I tried to change country only to find that the only country beginning with G was Germany...... So here I am faced with a drive across Greece with no map, fortunately we still have the TomTom with us, so once again Garmin has dropped me in it, this I think is the final nail in the coffin for me with Garmin, I'll just have to get used to the way the TomTom works.

I like this sat nav and it seems to work very well. I've used it for 3 months now and cannot point out any shortcomings. The only thing that is taking me time to get used to is the graphic display of the map. I previously had a TomTom and I found their graphics to be much better. It may be simply a matter of getting used to this, but other than that it works fantastically and of course Garmin doesn't ask you to pay for a map update every year.

I'm impressed with the improvements since my first Garmin satnav (which served well for many years, using it in UK, USA, Australia & New Zealand). The traffic data is very informative and suggests re-routes as an option. Also, the initial routing for an address is given as an option (much better than the prescriptive approach of the old unit). No computer matches up to human intelligence, so my wife and I take it as advisory - using it along with a map. But it is a useful aid.