Thank you all for information. It allowed me to make up my mind about which GPS unit to purchase. I got the Garmin Zumo 550. I have been using it the past few weeks in my car and I like it very much. Can wait for the snow to melt away and try it with my VFR. Gaetz
Gaetz: Start planning your routes and loading them up now. I spent too much time playing with it on nice days when I should have been riding. Prior perfect planning prevents piss-poor performance (the 7-P's)
Zumo 550: no convenient user manual! My new, '07 VFR 800A (red) arrived at the dealership several weeks ago, and in the interim they've installed and wired several electrical gadgets, including an Autocom Super Pro AVi Duo kit; a Zumo 550 mounting cradle, as well as a mounting platform and wiring for an Escort 8500 radar/lidar detector. (The mounting hardware specific to the '07 VFR for the Zumo and the radar detector were purchased from Cyclegadgets.com). My bike has since been sitting on the dealer's showroom floor until the weather improves enough for me to clean out a winter's worth of road grime before I ride the bike and then park it in my garage for the first time. Meanwhile, I excitedly brought home the Zumo 550 unit, along with the all of the items that remained in it's factory box, and as I sorted through all of this I eventually figured out (much to my displeasure) that unlike most every other consumer electronic device (including the BMW Navigator III, made by Garmin) the Zumo 550's package doesn't include a compact owner's manual in a compact booklet form! Instead, the Zumo 550's packaging includes only a CD-ROM version of an "Owner's Manual"! How absurd! How stupid! (Calling this "stupid" is an insult to most stupid people everywhere.) I soon learned that there appears to be only 2 ways to obtain a printed, hard-copy of the Zumo 550's manual, neither of which can hardly be considered "compact" and user-friendly: (1) Working from the CD-ROM, one can (with the help of Adobe Acrobat) print out the entire content, and doing so will require ~65 pages of single-sided paper print, as well as a huge amount of ink. Once you're finished, the thickness and the cumbersomeness of the resulting document is ridiculous. (2) I then called Garmin and asked them to please send me an owner's manual, but what I received in the mail was nothing more than what I'd printed on my home computer, only it was stapled, and the document was so thick that the ends of the staples ended up being nothing more than sharp barbs which cut and pierced my flesh... Hmmm... an owner's manual that's only available on CD-ROM!!! How many of us ride motorcycles while bringing along a f*cking laptop computer? When did owner's manuals in a small and convenient booklet form, go out of vogue? Give me a F*cking break!
The upside is that the GPS is very intuitive. I called and bitched about the same thing, and additionally, the unit would not charge from the wall power adaptor. I had to connect it to a 12v power supply through the motorcycle mount adaptor to charge it. Something they failed to include in the manual. I had to call customer service because it kept shutting off after a minute or two (because it wasn't charging!). Once I read through the CD and installed it on the motorcycle it has worked flawlessly and it is intuitively enough that I don't need to manual.
