Thread: Looking for a new GPS with some niche specs

Howdy all, I'm in the market for a GPS to replace my current one, which is a Garmin Nuvi 2595. I currently drive for my job, doing deliveries, and the Nuvi was provided for me, but it's proving inadequate to the task in some areas.

My primary reason for replacing it is waterproofness, or lack thereof, as I'm going to be using whatever I settle on, on a motorcycle, and probably at some point in the rain.

Next, is route planning. I use a routing app on an LTE tablet for my job, but the app's Turn-by-Turn is absolute rubbish. So I'm usually bulk entering in addresses into the Nuvi, 10-20 or more at a time. The Nuvi's interface for entering in an address requires too many steps, and on very common streets (Main St for example), it gets bogged down searching, sometimes taking more than a minute to display results, and in addition, it doesn't seem possible to limit the area where it searches, with the Nuvi constantly giving me results hundreds of miles away, when the farthest I get from home base is about 30-40 miles. And also on this point, while it is not absolutely necessary, as I can determine the shortest route looking at the map on the tablet, and then put it in the GPS in the correct order, it would be nice if the GPS could accept a list of addresses and draw the shortest route possible.

The Nuvi's screen is too small to display the surrounding area of a turn well, and I frequently end up in the wrong lane after a turn, causing me to miss a second turn in quick succession when in heavy traffic. In addition, it picks some VERY strange zoom levels at times that make it difficult to know when exactly a turn is coming, especially when it's shown as a curve on-screen, but it's really an intersection on the road, which happens very frequently in some neighborhoods and apartment complex lots. The Nuvi is also sluggish sometimes, seemingly at random. Tapping a button onscreen can sometimes take 5-6 seconds to get any response.

I've looked at the Garmin Zumo series, looked but not touched, unfortunately as no-one around me stocks them, or has a demo unit, though they can order them any time. I'm not hesitant about dropping $6-900 on the right thing, but I need to play with it for half an hour or so to know it's the right thing first. I'm also not stuck on a Garmin, (Only thing I've heard about TomTom is that the interface is wildly different than Garmin) or even on having a dedicated GPS. I've given thought to just using a second Android tablet with an Offline map app with Turn-by-Turn directions, but with the LTE tablet being the only one I currently have with a GPS receiver (my other tablet is a cheapy without GPS), I can't really do any real-world testing with the map apps available.