Garmin Drive 50 USA LMT GPS Navigator System with Lifetime Maps and Traffic, Driver Alerts, Direct Access, and Foursquare data

I was hesitant to order this GPS given the wide disparity between owner comments. Some loved it, others hated it. Ive had it for a month or so and put it through its paces using it both locally and interstate. It is a damned good product. I bought this for the one vehicle i own that does not have an in-dash GPS. I tested in my vehicles that do have in-dash GPS using both as i drove. What I like about this product is the little extras like warning me of upcoming sharp curves on tne road, high deer crossing areas, railroad track warnings and fatigue reminders. After a few hours stuck in traffic it shows a list of restaurants and rest areas close by if I elected to take a break. The screen is big and colorful and is easily visible in daylight. Some routes were different than what my in-dash GPS suggested but my experience is most GPS will offer interesting ways to ge to one place to another. The traffic updates are accurate. The FM sensor that picks up traffic reports is located in the piece that plugs into the cigarette lighter. One of my vehicles has the charger in the arm rest and the FM signal was still picked up despite being covered by the arm rest. Anyway, this is an excellent product and would buy it again.

This is very, very late, but to product was a good one.

The screen is larger and directions are pretty spot on. Only thing is it sometimes takes a couple mins to find satellite signal but that’s same with all the gps devices. I bought this one to replace my last Garmin that lasted 6 or 7 years and so far I like the new one much better for giving the directions more clearly and with a bit more notice before you pass the street you wanted to turn on, haha. If this one holds up like the last one did then I am a happy camper!

The online manual says to update maps with Garmin Express. On Windows 10, Garmin Express is worthless; it never recognizes the Garmin Drive 50 regardless of what laptop USB port or cable is used. The Garmin Drive 50's user interface is not intuitive. I will try it for a day or two and if it does not display usefulness, I will return it. UPDATE After a few days of use, I accrued an understanding of the user interface. The Drive 50 LMT provides excellent voice route instructions and the screen is a good balance of size and functionality. Overall four star. If the Garmin Express application worked, the overall rating would have been five.

Highly Recommended: Needed to replace a NUVI 1490. This Drive 50LM is a really nice unit easy to use. It has some really nice features you can toggle on, like upcoming speed limit changes and upcoming curves to name a few. Garmin fixed the USB jack. They placed a seal around the jack to stop it from becoming loose. Which is why I had to replace my 1490.

Garmin quality has really gone down hill. The device is very cheaply made. The software is sophmoric. Really spoiled by how much superior smartphone maps and navigation is today. I purchased this device because I was travelling to the UK and did not want to use data on my smartphone. Well I had to spring from another $70 to get the UK maps (note on my smartphone i could download them for free!!).The real clincher was that I planned all my routes for my 3 week venture across the UK. This was extremely painful exercise. I started by trying to enter my waypoints on the device (this was extremely time consuming). But the device would periodically lose all of its memory and thus I lost hours of work entering my trips. I then found the Garmin Basecamp Software and load that on my laptop. This made entering the waypoints slightly easier, but this software looks like it was written in the 90s and thus the interface was kludgy and the search capabilities were horrible. But at least it remembered my routes:)However, several times during the trip. I would have to pull the car over and re-download my routes from my laptop, because the device would periodically reset and lose all of its memory:( Extremely frustrating!!!Also, the routing logic in the UK seemed to be out of whack. I would find myself on single lane (traffic both directions sharing 1 lane) roads. Whilst single lane roads are not uncommon in the UK. I later found on many occasions that there were much better alternatives available for the destination that I was going to.The net result was that I quit using the Garmin 50 and reverted to using my Android Smartphone. Since I download the UK maps to my phone, I could access it offline and it gave far superior navigation than the dedicated Garmin 50 device. I just wish I had brought my car mount with me.The device also came with a very small amount of onboard storage that was over 90% consumed when I opened the box. I had to use an SD card to download the UK maps. BTW I am relatively sure that the SD card was not the issue for the device losing its routes, as the UK map was also stored on the external SD card and I never needed to re-download the base UK map. I also tried 2 other SD cards to confirm that the problem existed on all 3 SD cards. If you do purchase, this device you should expect that you will need to get an SD card. Another note on the SD card, is that the card does not "click" into the slot. Poor design as their is not any tactile feedback that the SD card is properly seated. Again I do not think that is the issue causing the memory loss.Also, apparently the UK maps that I had to purchase directly from Garmin are not refundable:( So I have $70 maps with no device to use them on:( I used to use Garmin GPS in the past and thought they were one of the best. I own several Garmin watches and really like them, so I wanted to like this product. But in the end it was total piece of unreliable crap.Bottom line is that I would NOT recommend this device to anyone.