My new Garmin 2730 gps arrived this morning, and I’ve been comparing it with the Garmin 2610 I just sold. It isn’t the latest and greatest from Garmin, but since the technology is changing fairly rapidly it becomes very expensive to play the “I want the latest and greatest game”. I’m quite comfortable to have last year’s model for less than half of last year’s price. My initial impressions are:
- The interface seems more polished, and it’s a nice touch that the “stop” button to forgo following a route is on the menu page, not another level down.
- When navigating on a route, and a turn is approaching, the voice now speaks the name of the road, street, highway, or interstate you are to turn onto. The 2610 just said “right turn”, the 2730 says “right turn onto Main Street”. Not huge, really, but perhaps helpful if there are closely-spaced and poorly-signed crossroads in your route.
- I am disappointed that the “tabs” containing information such as speed, altitude, time to turn, distance to turn, etc. are not transparent, but have a black background. On the 2610 the tabs had a transparent background and you could “see” the map behind the tab. This change has the net effect of making the map section of the screen smaller. On the 2610, you could “hide” a tab by touching the right side of the screen and just like a manila folder, there would be a tab graphic that, when touched, would unhide the tab and make it visible again. Touching the tab now takes you to either the “dashboard” or the turn information, depending on which tab you touch.
- This unit comes with the GXM30 XM receiver/antenna and once activated through XM the gps will control the XM receiver in the “puck”. I intend to use the gps on my Goldwing and also in my truck, so I have put together a mounting system that will easily go from one to the other.
Once I’ve used it a bit more and saved some waypoints I will undoubtedly have additional comments, so stay tuned.