I stumbled upon a "deal" this week and put in my order. FactoryOutletStore.com is selling refurbished Garmin 590LM devices for $519 with free shipping. (For that price, they should!)
Some of you will look at "refurbished" and walk away. This gps has the full Garmin warranty. Often all that has happened is someone opened the box and decided they wanted something different. The item gets returned to the manufacturer and thoroughly checked out...and then sold at a large discount. How much of a discount? Well, the 595LM is $899 and a 590LM is $799.
The difference between the 590LM and 595LM is very little. Which might be why Revzilla has put the 590LM on closeout. My thinking is that Garmin feels the less expensive model is cutting into their profits for the higher priced 595LM. How long will the 590LM be around as a new model? How long will you be able to find a refurbished model? Your guess is as good as mine.
Short story...well, maybe long.
I went to the BMW MOA Getaway event at Coeur d'Alene last Friday. I used my old reliable car GPS for the trip over. No problems...till I got to the other end. By then, the sun was coming behind me and washed out the screen, even though I have a very large sunshade on the GPS. I almost missed a freeway off-ramp and I did miss a couple of turns. I couldn't see the GPS screen, I was in traffic, and since there was no Bluetooth, I couldn't hear any instructions either.
On Saturday, I decided to combine the car GPS (for the visual) with my cell phone GPS (for the verbal). In theory, it should be great, but the reality wasn't. They both had different ideas of where to go, even with the same preferences.
On Sunday, I decided to use just the cell phone GPS with the TomTom app. I knew the way home, but wanted to just see how it worked on a trip like that. Well, it worked super...sort of. I hit a bump on the freeway and the screen flipped. If I stood on my head, I could read it. So I went a few more miles and while fiddling with it at 70 mph, it went to portrait mode...while in the mount in landscape mode. If I could only lay sideways on the seat, I could look at the screen correctly.
1: A hundred or so miles down the road, I took a break and got it situated correctly. If I hadn't known where I was going, this whole screen flipping could've been an issue...especially if it continued.
The other issue is part way through, the battery level started going down, even though the cell phone was plugged in. I only had the GPS program and an MP3 program running. The screen was on full brightness, and the sun had come out. Since I want to use the excellent camera on the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 on my post-retirement trip, this is/was a concern. By the time I got home, I was pretty convinced the time had come to quit kludging together a GPS system for my rides. The old car GPS worked great when I had only a couple turns to make on fairly low traffic and familiar roads. But in unfamiliar territory and with lots of traffic, it was out of its league.
$519 is not cheap. But compared to the cost of a new "motorcycle" GPS...it's a bargain.
Chris
Some of you will look at "refurbished" and walk away. This gps has the full Garmin warranty. Often all that has happened is someone opened the box and decided they wanted something different. The item gets returned to the manufacturer and thoroughly checked out...and then sold at a large discount. How much of a discount? Well, the 595LM is $899 and a 590LM is $799.
The difference between the 590LM and 595LM is very little. Which might be why Revzilla has put the 590LM on closeout. My thinking is that Garmin feels the less expensive model is cutting into their profits for the higher priced 595LM. How long will the 590LM be around as a new model? How long will you be able to find a refurbished model? Your guess is as good as mine.
Short story...well, maybe long.
I went to the BMW MOA Getaway event at Coeur d'Alene last Friday. I used my old reliable car GPS for the trip over. No problems...till I got to the other end. By then, the sun was coming behind me and washed out the screen, even though I have a very large sunshade on the GPS. I almost missed a freeway off-ramp and I did miss a couple of turns. I couldn't see the GPS screen, I was in traffic, and since there was no Bluetooth, I couldn't hear any instructions either.
On Saturday, I decided to combine the car GPS (for the visual) with my cell phone GPS (for the verbal). In theory, it should be great, but the reality wasn't. They both had different ideas of where to go, even with the same preferences.
On Sunday, I decided to use just the cell phone GPS with the TomTom app. I knew the way home, but wanted to just see how it worked on a trip like that. Well, it worked super...sort of. I hit a bump on the freeway and the screen flipped. If I stood on my head, I could read it. So I went a few more miles and while fiddling with it at 70 mph, it went to portrait mode...while in the mount in landscape mode. If I could only lay sideways on the seat, I could look at the screen correctly.
1: A hundred or so miles down the road, I took a break and got it situated correctly. If I hadn't known where I was going, this whole screen flipping could've been an issue...especially if it continued.The other issue is part way through, the battery level started going down, even though the cell phone was plugged in. I only had the GPS program and an MP3 program running. The screen was on full brightness, and the sun had come out. Since I want to use the excellent camera on the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 on my post-retirement trip, this is/was a concern. By the time I got home, I was pretty convinced the time had come to quit kludging together a GPS system for my rides. The old car GPS worked great when I had only a couple turns to make on fairly low traffic and familiar roads. But in unfamiliar territory and with lots of traffic, it was out of its league.
$519 is not cheap. But compared to the cost of a new "motorcycle" GPS...it's a bargain.
Chris
