I just returned from a week long vacation to Los Angeles. During my trip, I drove about 480 miles in southern California traffic, using my Garmin 3590LMT the entire time. The verdict? It was a good experience overall, however I experienced two significant problems.
First, the good....The routing combined with the 3D Traffic service was very, very good. You can say one thing about LA - there is always "another way" to get everywhere. The Garmin unit seemed to find them. The unit seemed to do a good job in general, of avoiding traffic jams. There were three times when it actually got me off the freeway and back on later down the road to avoid a significant traffic issue. Unfortunately, in one case confirmed by visual confirmation, the traffic incident was false. Overall though, I was very impressed with the routing and the traffic. I've had very different experiences with the traffic quality on the 3590 in other markets, but in LA I found it to be very good.
The awareness of POV lanes, lane guidance and freeway sign imagery were extremely valuable on this trip. I do not know LA freeways at all. I am driving blindly for the most part, trusting the Garmin. Gladly, I could trust it and the guidance features it provides make a dedicated PND much better than most smartphone solutions. Had we been driving our RV instead of a rental car, I would proclaim the lane guidance (in particular) irreplaceable.
Unfortunately, the 3590 exhibited a significant problem with random rebooting. Upon landing in LA, my unit rebooted *6* times in the 30 minute trip from the airport to our condo. In the course of the week, the unit rebooted over a dozen times. This is very disappointing, but unfortunately par for the course with Garmin in recent years it seems. Do a Google search for Nuvi rebooting and you'll find thousands of discussions dating back to the 7xx series. Garmin can justify spending $300+ dollars on a PND in a smartphone world only if they can show significantly better features and rock solid reliability. The features? Yeah, I think they do that. Reliability? Not so much.
Upon rebooting, I found the unit to have very sketchy reliability in terms of reconnecting to bluetooth on my smartphone. Since I am using Garmin Smartphone Link, reestablishing smartphone bluetooth connectivity is essential to getting my traffic content back - a must when traveling on LA freeways. In many cases, the only way to reestablish bluetooth connectivity with my smartphone was to disable bluetooth in the Nuvi settings and re-enable it. Having to do this changes the reboot problem on the 3590 from an annoyance to a complete hassle. A random reboot on a Nuvi is like a Windows blue screen of death. It makes you cuss Garmin as much as people cuss Microsoft. Frankly, I expect better from Garmin.
The second big problem that I experienced is with the Smartphone Link Advanced Weather feature. I outlined the complete failure of the weather alert feature in a previous blog post. Unfortunately, the performance of this feature got worse on my trip. I have two locations set in the weather alerts settings. I have my hometown (Des Moines, IA) and my "current location." While traveling in LA, I routinely received WINTER STORM ALERTS while driving in LA. Huh? It was March, in LA - there is no winter there. Of course when I pressed the weather alert icon, I received no information because Garmin isn't providing the text of the weather alerts as I outlined in my previous post. Perhaps, I thought, the alert wasn't for my current location in LA, but rather was for my other defined location of Des Moines, IA. However, the problem with that idea, is that I knew that on that day in Des Moines the weather was approaching 80 degrees! In no way was there any Winter Storm Alerts in Des Moines, IA or Los Angeles, CA last week. Had Garmin implemented this feature in a way that actually shows us the text of the weather alert, I might have been able to figure out what was actually going on. Since the weather alert text content is blank, it is impossible to trouble shoot. What I know is that from this experience and the experience that I outlined earlier the Smartphone Link weather service is not worthy of a charge and I would not recommend that anyone purchase it until Garmin fixes the problems.
