Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

i purchased the 2597 to replace a 2350 which was good but had a bug in it (caused the 2350 to stop giving the next turn in the upper left and had to be turned off and restarted). I will compare these two in my review. Start up time: The 2597 appears to go to sleep instead of turn off when you press the power button. Power up is less than 2 seconds which is great. The 2350 was closer to 20 - 30 seconds. Security: The 2597 can not be locked, i.e. with a 4 digit pin. Not a huge deal, but I liked the feature on the 2350. I am sure thieves can find a way around this feature which is why it's not a big deal. Just don't use you actual house for home, I use the beginning of my street instead. Screen: Here is my biggest gripe. The 2350 screen is excellent, it has saturated colors that are easy to read, the 2597 appears washed out and although the colors in some areas (like the purple path you follow are deep enough, they are no where near as deep as the 2350. This is the reason for 4 stars instead of 5. The text is still readable, but it's been raining here for a week, so I haven't seen the screen in bright sunlight. Text: My biggest gripe with the 2350 was although it had excellent colors, the font was smaller than it had to be. I have owned about 5 garmin GPS models and the 2350 has lots of space to put the words, but it didn't use all the space. The 2597 has a bigger screen, but it also has a much better font. It is much easier to read and I couldn't really ask for more. Information Displayed: I really like the way the information is displayed, Speed limit and current speed have been moved to the left (the 2350 had them on the right), When you happen to go over the speed limit, the area around your current speed becomes a shaded red, other models turn the font to red. I like the shading better. I also REALLY like that the current road is on the bottom of the screen (in a readable font) and the next road is on the top of the screen. Next turn: On the top left is the next turn, on multilane highways the 2350 would show you which lane or lanes, on the 2597 it SOMETIMES shows you if there are 4 lanes and you can be in the right 2 lanes (as an example). Note sure why this happens on some road and not others. But, it always tells you audibly if you should be in a certain set of lanes. Speaker: The speaker appears to be slightly louder than the 2350, but as usual, it heavily distorts up around 100% and there appears to be little difference between 85% and 100%. So you may think you have power to spare at 85%, but really you don't, you are close to full volume. Voice command: I have only owned this for a few days, but I like the voice command. It works great for my voice. I would recommend that only one person use voice command though, because when my wife tried to use it, it didn't work very well for her, and then after that, it seemed like it didn't work as well for my voice. So, I think it "learns" the voice and more than one may confuse the algorithm. Routes: There is nothing about this on Garmin's site or others, and I don't know why since I think it's a major improvement. When you go someplace you can select from up to 3 routes and they show you the 3 routes on the screen, like google maps does. Then you just select the which route you like. Adding destinations; It does a better job at adding destinations than the 2350, The 2597 shows you the destinations as a set of rows on the screen, from 1st destination to last destination, and you can just select one of them and move it up or down in your route. Trip Log: It has it, and I really like this feature. It shows you where you have been as a set of blue "bread crumbs". If I take a strange route someplace and want to back out the way I came, these bread crumbs are perfect for doing this. Recalculating: The new 2597 doesn't say this, which you may think is great, but it also doesn't say ANYTHING to you when it does recalculate, i.e. if you go off an a different road it won't tell you where to turn until the next turn comes up, which may be 100 miles away. I wish it would have said something, like "continue on I95 for 100 miles". Overall, I really like this model. I will try to add to this review as I use it more. I hope this helps people.