Smartphone Link -- Advanced Weather

I bought all three premium apps since the price went down.

But the advanced weather is the only one I really use.

These services aren't available for Windows phone

Good to know. I will have to check into that.

Used it as well and its a good feature to have, when it works. I had problems with it constantly alerting while taking a trip over Thanksgiving and the animated radar feature simply didn't work at all while driving that trip. The constant alerting got a bit tiring after a while. I assume it was doing that as I entered each area where there was a weather alert entry on my trip. Was getting the alert about every 10 minutes. Was disappointed the animated radar wasn't working properly as I was trying to avoid driving into snow/ice on my route.

I was taking a trip over the Thanksgiving from DC area to Boston. I was in the same situation trying to avoid the snow on the route. The animated radar didn't work.

The storm passed through with a big punch, the strongest in 6-7 years!

During the fierce period of the storm, the alert types varied among "Flash Flood Watch", "Storm Warning", "Flash Flood Warning", etc. The types of alerts matched the alerts broadcast through the Emergency Alert Systems and the various media broadcasts. The color of the icon changed too, matching the color codes of the weather alert map.

I drove passed a school today. And noticed that the alert icon changed to an exclamation mark on a grey background. Clicking on the icon brings up a text screen showing a list of two alerts: a School zone and a Storm Warning".

The weather radar worked, kind of. Sometimes it shows the radar map in a few seconds. Sometimes it got stuck in the screen showing "updating..".

Overall, in my opinion, the Advanced Weather is a worthwhile addition.

I found that the Smartphone Link apps on my 3597, including Advanced Weather, are no different than the apps on the smartphone itself. They all rely on a good 3G signal and are subject to cellular network and server demand overload.

In my case, Advanced Weather works fairly well. Occasionally, I get stuck on the “loading” screen or it will freeze without animating. When that happens, the other weather apps I have on my iPhone 5, “Intellicast”, “NOAA Radar”, and “Hi-Def Radar” do not work correctly either. Usually, this happens during a storm which unfortunately is when I really need the information.

Now that I have a Garmin Nuvi 3597, I have been playing around with the various features and I have looked a bit closer at Smartphone Link. Premium Live Services includes Garmin Live Traffic, PhotoLive Traffic Cameras, and Advanced Weather.

Garmin Live Traffic lists $19.99. The price seems a bit steep to me. I will look into this a bit more, but for now I am going to sit this one out.

PhotoLive Traffic Cameras lists $4.99. I guess the price is reasonable enough, but I am sort of hard pressed to justify it for me.

Advanced Weather is $4.99. It looks like this has forecasts and radar images, so it is more than the basic weather that is included. Has anybody here has a weather alert come through on this? Is it just like the NOAA Weather Radio where you here a tone?

With so many things free on the web, it would be interesting to see how many people are getting this from Garmin.

I also played with the regular Garmin Live Services, which included Address Sharing, Weather, Dynamic Parking, and Last Mile.

The Address Sharing is quite handy. I can think of two places recently that not in mu on-board POIs yet. Cabela's Retail Store, 8400 Hudson Road, Woodbury, MN. Smartphone Link finds it, including the telephone number, and sends it to my Nuvi 3597, but the telephone number doesn't transfer over. Not a huge deal, but I think it would be handy if the telephone number came over, too.

A Spire Credit Union near me just moved a few days ago. They were 3344 Promenade Avenue B103, Eagan, MN 55122, which is what most online providers show, unless you drill down to their own corporate web site, where it shows the new address of 1251 Town Centre Drive, Eagan, MN 55123. Does anybody happen to now how long it will take for things to get updated?

It looks like the Garmin site for Weather lists view forecasts and current conditions. I will have to look into this further to see what the differences are in the forecasts.

Dynamic Parking states that it will find parking close to your destination,including the number of spots available and current cost. That might be handy. I am glad it does not require an additional fee.

Last Mile states that it remembers your parking spot and shows your destination, so you can find your way on foot and back again. I have/had that with my Garminfone. Maybe I will try this at the Mall Of America soon to see how well it works.

One of the biggest issues with my old was locating brand new streets in cities just after they were built. My work around was to go the county property records website, pull the GPS coordinates, and navigate directly to the coordinates. In most cases that worked out pretty well. It was a bit of extra work sometimes to pull the coordinates of the property, but it was the best I could come up with at the time.

I wouldn't mind seeing Garmin resurrect some of the other services that vanished. For example, listing fuel prices was handy. Granted, smartphone apps are available today with that. Which makes me wonder if an Android based automobile navigator, like we have seen in some Asian markets, could be coming this way.

I wouldn't even mind having the movie listings make a reappearance. Granted, we typically look on line at home, or on the smartphone, to see what is playing and where, but still it could be handy.

I have 3597LMTHD for more than year and half now. I am also using Live services/smartphone link from day one. I had Android phone at that time and purchased all services which was $30 I believe. Now I have Iphone, so I had to buy live services again. Luckily, traffic and live weather were on 50% off sale couple of months ago. This time I did not purchase Live Traffic cameras because I did not really use it and did not really find real use of it either.

I live in Toronto Canada area and often get weather alerts about snow squalls and other storms. Actually I have noticed that some times these alerts show up even before I listen them on radio.

Live traffic works very well and love it. I consider it even better than HD traffic because HD traffic will work only when you are within the HD signal range but live traffic will everywhere as long as you have internet on your phone. I tested Live Traffic at lost of places and works very well.

I think Gas prices etc. feature still available in HD. I think lots of info is available on smartphones these days that is why they took it out from GPS devices.

That hurts that you had to buy it a second time. Does that mean if you upgrade to a new iPhone you have to pay full price again, or only if you switch platforms?

You have to pay only if you switch platforms as I did.

I just purchased the subscriptions to all the premium features...live traffic, weather, traffic cameras, and so far my only issue has been with the weather alerts. I'm in upstate NY near Albany and the past few days my nuvi keeps alerting me to Lake Effect Snow Watches and Warnings. My only issue is that these alerts have been for areas 75-100+ miles from where I've been and are more annoying than anything. If it popped up planning a route through the alert area or if I was close to the alert area I'd love it; hopefully when spring/summer comes with thunderstorms and the like it will be more useful.

is particularly important if you're traveling thru canyon areas where the storms may not be too close & not seeable from where you are. but where the threat is significant for flash flooding.

Fred
An old retired NWS guy

Quite true. In the San Francisco south bay, the weather condition along the coast and in the hills of the coastal range could be quite different form my local area. Even though the coast is only 30-40 miles away.

We definitely do not wish to be caught in a storm/flash flood driving through the windy mountain roads.

For me, SmartLink drops connection with my NuviCam about a minute after connecting. In my case, the app is totally unreliable when using with the NuviCam. If you look at the reviews on the iTunes App Store, this is a constant complaint among users.

I am using the iPhone 6s, so I don't know if the stability of the connection between the phone and the Nuvi is any more stable on Android. But for iPhone users, the app is nearly worthless if you depend on a reliable connection to the Nuvi. Like I said, a simple search of the reviews for this app tell the story.

Just FYI, based on my experience. And although an updated version of the app was just released, the stability of the connection to the Nuvi is still poor.

Doesn't seem like the software side is Garmin's strong point.

I have been using a Galaxy S5 (Android) for SmartLink traffic and weather to my 3597 for about a couple of years with no problems at all, this includes the year in which my wife "calculated" that we had driven in 13 Eastern states. My short tryout to my NuviCam also worked with no problems.

Has anyone looked into how much data this uses? I would like to get the advanced weather but I am on a 5GB shared plan.

There are at least a couple threads here at The Factory showing that very little data is used for the Smartphone Link, including traffic, advanced weather, etc. Search here to find these older threads.

I use a Tracfone smartphone where I pay for every MB of data used and was also worried. I use the Smartphone Link and have the Advanced Weather, Traffic, etc. The data usage is minimal even for me who pays for each MB of data used. For someone with a monthly data allotment, data will not be a problem.

Thanks CraigW!

I used it on a week long trip NC -> Cape Cod driving around and back and did not blow my 500MB data limit.

I purchased the weather and Photolive traffic camera parts of this app but I have never been able to get the traffic cameras to work in the Montreal area. I can get the ones that are in the Ottawa area with no problem but when it does the search for cameras in Montreal it says non are found.

There is an app on iTunes for the IOS devices that is very similar to photoLive. The app is called Sigalert and its free. I have used it for almost 2 years in the Buffalo/Rochester area. I've used it on my phone to see the usual trouble spots and avoid them. I know saving $4.99 is not a lot but I've never been let down by the app.

Version 2.3.2 for Smartphone Link app (IOS) is supposed to have fixed the Live Traffic issue as per the release note on the app store.

Just like live traffic, weather reports can sometimes be 100 miles or more from your location. Last spring, I was driving in northern NH and kept getting a "Costal Flood Warning" alert. It turns out the flooding was in coastal NJ! Annoying, yes but I would rather have the warning and ignore it than not have the warning at all.

These days I get a strange weather warnings. "Small craft warning" or "Marine warning".
Not sure why because my GPS is for car and not for aircraft or boat.

These are warnings for me. Garmin doesn't know if I am on the road or on the water.

dobs108

nuvi 3597, GPS 76