Gadgetory

it's got a sharp five-inch screen to go along with the design that's also so sharp you might cut yourself on it I'm Antoine Goodwin and this is the flagship Garmin Nuvi 3597 LMT HD it's the top of the line model in their lineup and this is your first look but first let's take a look at how you're going to connect it to your car I've got the cradle right here and it's actually kind of cool got your regular suction cup mount here for connecting to glass but instead of Clips it's got a magnetic ring right here that circles some data and power connections right here that are going to pull traffic data from the power cable that integrates an HD radio receiver that's gonna get you a lifetime of free traffic and infinite data simply take your Garmin Nuvi and slap it on and it brings to life almost instantaneously that's because this thing actually never goes to complete power off mode unless you hold the power button down usually it's just in a suspend mode ready to go one of the first thing that you'll notice is this kept its big 5 inch capacitive touchscreen with a glass display it's 800 by 480 pixels which isn't super sharp by smartphone standards but it's way sharper than most standalone GPS devices that I've ever tested being capacitive you've got the ability to swipe and pinch to zoom just like you would on a smartphone and it's super responsive I've also found that the traffic data that's supplied by the HD radio receiver is also pretty accurate I went searching after some of the traffic gyms that it reported and much to my disappointment they actually were there fortunately the nudies algorithms will route you around that traffic when you start getting close it'll pop up something on display and say hey would you like me to reroute I like that one of the other things that I really like about this is Garmin's move to a search based destination input system so you've still got your standard sort of py searches and the ability to enter an address but at the top of the screen you'll see that there's now a search box you can put anything in this box either in address or the name of a business or a category of destination and when you hit search the new vo figure out what you like I really like that you don't have to punching down into separate menus it's very smart phone googly way of looking at things that's very cool but then you also don't even actually have to touch the screen to input destinations and to control your Nuvi got a really good voice command system that is truly hands-free the tiny microphone right here is always listening for a spoken command in this case it's voice command and you simply say that in the Nuvi will spring to life and be ready to listen to your responses it's actually pretty good at not picking up the words in the flow of a conversation you kind of have to specifically speak them so if I just say voice command in a sentence it won't come to life but if I stop and go voice command then it springs to life now on the screen you've got visual prompts right here that lets you know the sort of things that you can say to the Nuvi one of the things that I really like is that you can input an address in one fell swoop without having to stop for a separate prompts for street name for the number and fitty and all of that find address two three five seconds three San Francisco California and it's going to simulate the route because we're indoors but we're just like that you're on your route I also like that you can speak business names to it and it'll figure those out as well find place Five Guys Burgers and Fries it takes it a second but it actually did figure out that very complicated name and it showed me exactly what I'm looking for now I can either tap this and start going or I can continue through the voice command system it's also got some cool features such as Bluetooth hands-free calling and when you're paired with a smart phone you can install an app that gives you some interesting connectivity features but to find out more about those you'll want to check out our full review over on cnet.com until then I've been Antoine Goodwin and this has been your first look at the Garmin Nuvi 3597 LMT HD