My New Nuvi 1490LMT

Mine says 1.76 GB.

I'm not really sold on the value of the Traffic feature. It's really only good for expressways and when the unit re-routes you, you can't see what that traffic is like so you often get routed into more gridlock.

I first tried the traffic receiver on my 650, but when the subscription ran out I did not renew it. Then I got the 1490T as a gift so I have it anyway. But I wouldn't bother buying it again.

But I agree about the traffic. It is mostly useless in my experience.

$249 in Costco

So far I think I agree about the traffic thing, I got warnings this morning about traffic that didn't exist exist.

Traffic is really useless..

I like the traffic very much. This past summer I traveled from Chicago to North Carolina and the traffic warnings were accurate most of the time saving us tons of minutes of our trip. Here in the Chicago area it works well. While traffic is not perfect it has made great strides in the last few years.

Did you purchase your unit based on it having traffic reporting?

If you go to the first menu screen, where you can choose "Where to go" and "View map" and the others, press on the little "signal intensity" indicator on the top left of the screen and hold it for a few seconds, you'll get the screen you want.

As for Garmin ignoring the other systems, assume they're using the lowest cost solutions first and one day they may grow to learn how much easier the other ones are.

I just upgraded to the 1490LMT myself. This is the first time I ever had a traffic feature in my GPS and I am quite pleased with it. Living in LA, there are always traffic jams on the freeway and just the other day it showed me this fantastic new route saving me probably 20+ mins of sitting there on the highway!

I have found the traffic to work some of the time but not enough to be reliable

I am holding on to my 885t for as long as I can. I would hate to lose my mp3 player and aux. port from which I pipe the sound through my vehicle speakers.
Maybe they will see a need to reintroduce these features in the future

In Memphis I saw my first traffic icon. The icon stayed green and a pop-up appeared alongside, indicating a 5 second delay. Upon exiting the I-240, a yellow line appeared along our programmed route. The next day on I-55 a red line appeared next to our route while passing a construction area. The icon stayed green and there was no noticeable delay on either day. I can't find a FAQ for this.

I just got mine for $219cdn at Costco and returned a XXL540TM for the same price. I have a Nuvi 760 also. I really liked the XXL540TM a lot and the many features it has that the Nuvi's do not, but I needed the better POI search by category that the Nuvis have when I am travelling. I'm not going to use my smartphone roaming out of country while in the states to find places, so the gps has to do it. Groceries, shopping, all done easier on the Garmins when you don't know the name of stores in another place. Loading extra pois only helps so much.
The earlier turn warnings and customizable screen of the TomTom fell victim to the better poi search and find of the Nuvi.

How do you like the display and is the resolution any better..?

It is much more clear and bright and seems to show more detail, and have larger fonts. All this is in comparison to my c340 StreetPilot, which I will now only take on long trips away from home as my "backup."

Have you found the screen yet? If not just press the signal strength icon in the top left corner of the Where To screen for 5+ seconds and you'll get what the satellite screen your looking for.

Traffic is Ok though not perfect. rely on it in DC area when I have to commute to Virgina through beltway.

I noticed "major" problem on bluetooth phone thing. 1490T always displays "caller unknown (or unknow caller)" when my mobile phone rings through 1490T. To me that is not an improvement.

very sad, Garmin.

I grabbed a 1490LMT as well. Traffic is useless (zero coverage where I live), but as said the 5" scree is nice, especially as I grow older. LOL

I like the bigger screen a lot more then my past 255W and StreetPilot.

One quick note about traffic, not sure if this is true or not but I was told to not keep the power cable with the traffic tuner wrapped up. Keep it loose in the car.

Traffic is going to be a function of how well your traffic provider does timely updates.

In my experience here in SoCal, I hadn't found it useful yet (San Diego area) because we don't usually have huge traffic tie ups. Last weekend, I went through L.A. and came back home after visiting my daughter.

Shortly after getting on the freeway in the northern part of L.A., the traffic icon turned red and indicated a 20 minute delay! Ouch! I hate those kinds of delays. I quickly tuned into the L.A. news and traffic station on AM radio, and sure enough, they told of a sig alert on my southbound route. And they said it was causing a massive delay.

I programmed the GPS to guide me on an alternate route, and smugly bypassed the mess.

On that one night, the traffic feature paid for itself.

Your mileage may vary (no pun intended).

On my recent trip to Los Angeles. The traffic function works reasonable well for me. I guess because I often go to populated metro area. I get most of the benefit.

I won't buy one without an mp3 player built in.

Fred

I wouldn't pay for a traffic subscription if it was being sold for .10. It's useless and worthless.

I agree. I live in a major city and the traffic info is worthless, if not a negative. It routes you around non-existent traffic jams, but into unknown jams. It doesn't tell you it routed you around traffic, just does. (I turned this off finally.) Yesterday I'd been sitting in a 2 mile jam for about 5 min when GPS announced "Traffic Ahead" - REALLY?

I only leave it on thinking it would be of some value when I travel to an unfamiliar area, but they need to either improve or ditch this piece of it.

Upgrade is painful mostly because of amount of data transferred. US maps are about 2GB, EU even more - over 3GB. If I remember correctly. It's a lot of data to transfer over internet. It takes even more time if you updating at same time like thousands others. If you hit jackpot with not busy server it goes nicely.

Then all this data must be transferred to the unit. Older of them have old usb 1.1 interfaces. That means slow transfer. And even if you have newer usb 2.0 than to cut cost flash memory in units are not top speed products. So it's all technical limits. I don't expect changes in this department too soon.

On other hand I would like to see Linux version of mapsource and garmin updater. But like with all big corporations I'm not holding my breath. Maybe it happen, one day

I'm not sure what problem you had with upgrading unit. It's time consuming, but otherwise fairy simple. And upgrading firmware (unit's OS) doesn't usually take more than a few minutes. Maps can take hours but they are transferred in one run by update software. Only trick is with choosing to install maps on computer as well or they will go only on unit. And minimum system requirements is windows xp, so it should be no problem to use even a few years old computer for upgrades. Only must for web updates is creating account and registering device with on garmin website.
There is manual about how to upgrade maps from garmin:
http://static.garmincdn.com/pumac/Updating_Maps.pdf

I'm really liking my 1490T better & better. I haven't put the routing to the test much yet (although I will - I run annual car club cruises which require 100+ waypoints to get the correct route). But everything else seems to be working okay. I don't live close enough to major metro areas to test traffic, although I make occassional trips to Chicago & Minneapolis. Bluetooth works fine for me, with my Blackberry Curve 8530. Talked to my wife with it last night, and she said it sounded okay. After having it for a week, the contacts finally started transferring to the Garmin. Not sure why it took so long for that part to start working. And I am having great fun changing the TTS commands with turboccc's program. Last night, my Garmin actually told me, "In point two miles, burn rubber and whip this thing around!"

There are two problems with traffic:
- Some areas really have bad traffic reporting
- People don't understand it's a tool and how to use it.

Not much you can do about #1. #2, though - that's really just about thinking about it.

Traffic reports aren't instantaneous. You're not going to see a wreck happen directly in front of you and then look over to your GPS to see it immediately popup.

The GPS also doesn't do anything for you in regards to daily rush-hour traffic. It's not like you're going to take a normal 1-hour/30mi commute, buy a GPS, and transform that 1-hour commute to a 30min commute. It's just not going to happen.

If you've lived in any major city any length of time you can probably guess the daily traffic. You know it'll be worse when it rains and not as bad over certain holidays (like Christmas to New Years).

The real benefit of traffic on your GPS is when you're getting into your car, heading down your normal commute home and it pops up with: Major accident 5miles ahead. Use alternate?

It's still going to take you a long time to get home because you're going to be using a less than preferred route (assuming your preferred route is the shortest time-wise) - but you're not going to be tied up in that particular jam.

I suggest, if you have traffic, to set it to: "Don't automatically route me around traffic" and also input your route for each trip to and from work (the idea being that it'll know which roads you're taking and will report traffic on those roads to you). The reason is that if you see that there's an incident holding you up on your way home you are a better judge of what to do than it is. You might see: "Traffic ahead.. Vehicle on shoulder..." and figure, "Well, it's best if I just push through that one." You might see something like, "Major accident ahead... 4 right lanes blocked..." and think to yourself, "You know what - I need to take an alternate route home." If you leave it on auto-traffic avoidance it will avoid both of these incidents when it might not have been what you really wanted.

Anyway, I think there's a real misconception about the use of traffic.

..and yes, I have been in the car and it reported an incident and I'm driving right by it and see nothing or it reported heavy traffic and it's a holiday with virtually no one about. I'm figuring:
- for the incident: maybe it just got cleared up a few moments ago and traffic wasn't that backed up OR maybe someone mis-reported it.
- for the holiday issue (where's the traffic): I figure they use historical data along with daily reports to try to show you what the traffic is. They don't need a specific report to know that traffic will be slower than the speed limit in Atlanta between 7 and 9AM. For each weekday that's pretty much a given.

I bought 1490LMT at Costco for $219.99 with $30 off. Pretty good deal. I like the unit 5" compare to ther other one.

A relative just bought a 1490t, just like mine, so I could help her. (Blind leads blind). Her slow connection reported estimate of 27 hours. It took about 12. At least she did not have to delete voices & stuff to make room for the update, (like I did)

would be interested in experiences with routing. Routing is a feature I really use a lot.

The following example may not mean much to those unfamiliar with Houston--or the legendary Houston traffic--but even in general I think it illustrates how traffic "may help."

There are two major North-South interstates from IAH airport to near downtown Houston, I-45 and I-59. I usually take I-59 in from the airport because it's less traveled, and also dumps me off closer to my destination.

The last trip in a few weeks ago, my 1490T said to exit I-59 to take I-45 when I got near the city (the airport is about 15 miles or so North of downtown). Not really knowing why, I almost didn't take the advice (usually thinking that I'm smarter than my GPSr and usually being wrong), but at the last minute wanted to see the new routing.

The change was due to a truck turnover (happens a lot in Houston) on I-59 that occurred at 3pm. I was coming through the area around 5:30pm so the radio reports had time to be sent to the 1490T. Luckily I did take the advice. I got to my destination about 15 minutes later than usual, but avoided the closed I-59 highway with its miles of gridlock, which wasn't reopened to traffic again until after 10pm that night.

Free was worth it for me!

I just got the 1490T about two weeks ago. Costco's here do not have the LMT only the T - too bad! Anyway - I bought it at Costco for $169. The traffic is OK - I have not been in really heavy traffic since and it it only reporting on what the radio traffic reports know about - if it can route me around those before I get deep into them then fine.

What I do find is a waste is the Junction View. We went through major highways in Metro NYC and only once did Junction View pop up and show the exit - for about three seconds. Nothing on the New Jersey Turnpike and only once on the PA Turnpike. This was one of the features that I wanted this model for - we have encountered some pretty confusing exits on some of our travels. From what I have seen Lane Assist does it all and this is just a waste for the limited areas that it covers. Garmin told me that it works in major Metro areas- if it does not work in and around NYC then what is a more "major metro" area than that?

Junction View is fairly new. I remember when nuvi models first displayed speed limits--they pretty much only covered interstate highways. Future map updates added speed limits to a majority of US roadways. If Junction View follows this model, future map updates will add a lot more views--at least I hope so.

I used my 1490lmt today to get back home. I was surprised just how efficiently it routed me back home to avoid traffic, ignoring two obvious options and giving me a third one which I didn't even realize - and I'm generally familiar with the area. Very nice surprise, and a good example that even free traffic works once in a while

You don't need it often but it's nice to know it's there when you do need it.

That's exactly it.

It saves me time a few times out of a year (~6 - this is for Atlanta). Normally you're just dealing with crappy traffic and the odd wreck which isn't worth routing around. When you get that multi-car pile-up or overturned tractor trailer, it really does make a difference.

I find it also helpful for major events. Parades have shown up on my GPS as have other items like when there's multiple sporting events that are happening at the same time and likely to affect traffic. It'll basically say something like: Incident Alert: Multiple sporting events. Avoid downtown.

I just think people have this idea of: "Oh, my GPS has traffic. Now I'll never be stuck/late again!" It's really not the case.

I look forward to what Dash Express had going before they shut down. It was a real-time interactive traffic system so that as you drove around it reported back to the main servers your speed along certain routes and combined that for each of the roads to give you a more complete and accurate picture of what was happening. So, for example, you may see the interstate turn 'red' but then see that as other people got off and started using the surface streets those turned red as well. It also used the normal traffic reports and historical data - it wasn't [i]just[/i] user-reported data.

Navigon does this for the iPhone. The thing is, while I thought it was a great idea the iPhone makes for a crappy GPS. Don't get me wrong. The Navigon software is nice and if you have it mounted to something off your windshield or (even better) the XM SkyDock it'll sit nicely on your dash but the graphics are too small. With my normal GPS (in-dash Kenwood/Garmin unit) I can glance over and see what's going on. With the iPhone/Navigon I have to look down and it takes me more than a glance to get my bearings / read the screen to see what's going on. I really think it's just the small screen. Getting back to traffic: I have seen it update certain areas for slow traffic. I think that it's problem is day-to-day usage for most people. People are lazy and, generally speaking, aren't going to pull their iPhone out of their pocket every time to get into the car. Because of this you end up with less reporting and, from a user's point of view, less usage because you're probably just as lazy as everyone else.

I really like the idea of the GPS reporting back traffic, though. Just makes a lot of sense to me.