Considerably more robust then the car version. It works with my gloves too. The only draw back is the BASECAMP software, it appears to be a worked over version made to work with windoze 10 from back in the DOS days. It is not intuitive and needs a complete workover and to make it pretty much plug and play, instead of WTF is this all about and getting stuck in combersome read, then trying to figure out what they mean. It really is NOT EASY.

Great piece of gear for any motorcycle/adventurer. I took this on my trip from Minnesota to Texas and back. It navigated me with ease to my destination. I wish it was easier to setup between using main highways or using more back roads (not gravel unless you want that). I did have an instance where I had to change my destination and it switched me to back roads instead of main highways and cost me about an hours time. This was relevant in my case since I was attempting (and completed) the Iron Butt Challenge (Ride 1000 miles in 24hrs or less).The product is durable and easy to use even with thick leather gloves. It does take a little bit of finesse to get used to thick gloves and the screens responsiveness. (You don't need to have smart phone touch gloves since it's pressure sensitive on the touch screen). I rode with this in the rain and the RAM mount that comes with it worked perfectly for my motorcycle clutch lever mounting area. The RAM mount itself is easy to install and took only a few minutes. The mount locks on and can be secured pretty darn tight which prevents it from moving at all. Only problem I have with the clutch lever mount is that if you take your hand off the handlebar, the handlebar itself can wiggle up and down making it difficult to read. (not the fault of this product by any means).The GPS is pretty damn accurate and reliable. I would however make sure you acquire satellite connection before taking off. I had a time or two where it constantly was trying to acquire satellite connection but I guess I was going too fast for it to get connection. Only once did it fail to acquire a satellite connection at all because of location, and that was in a low lying area with mountains around. As for battery life I'm not too sure, I installed the charge cable directly to the battery and never noticed any trouble with it. The system starts fairly fast, and is capable of streaming music to your sound system if that's what you desire. I prefer to listen to the hum of my motorcycle and the open road.All in all this is a fantastic product and worth the money (I purchased mine when it was on sale). If you want top of the line then you can go and spend it, but if you just want a reliable, durable, GPS that gets the job done. This is your jam.

I've been an avid user of a Garmin Zumo 550 for years, and before that had the 450. I've ridden back and forth across the US with those units and found them invaluable, both for navigation, and for their built-in MP3 features. Still, I see Garmin announce new units and find myself jealous of features like Lane Assist, lifetime maps, and support for media cards larger than 8 GB. So when Garmin releases a new unit I buy it, check it out, and then invariably return it because I have yet to find a new model that works as well as the Zumo 550. As you might have guessed with my star rating for the 395LM that is – frustratingly – the case with this, their latest motorcycle GPS.There's much to like about the 395LM. The unit is thinner than my clunky old 550 and I love the new mount. It's lightweight, easy to disengage, and welll-protected from the elements. Also, Garmin has gone back to a single cable for power, which is a big improvement over the nest of cables that shipped with some previous models. Unfortunately, Garmin no longer offers a cable that goes from their proprietary power connector to PowerLet. I don't want to leave the mount on the bike all the time, so I like the option of plugging it into the PowerLet adapter on the dash of my bike. Since no option is available from Garmin, I cut up the supplied cable and added a PowerLet cable to the end. This works fine – just be sure you leave the big transformer box from the original cable in your new Frankenstein cable.The screen is incredibly bright and very easy to see, even in direct sunlight. I didn't think I'd care about the extra screen width, but it's nice because it allows for status panels to pop up without completely obscuring the map. This makes the interface far less modal than what I have on my 550. That said, we now come to my first deal-breaker with the 395LM – Garmin has made many critical interface elements so small that I can't see them while riding. Speed and distance to the next turn are significantly smaller than they were on the 550. What's more, indications of the next turn – say the number of an exit – are now displayed as cute little road sign icons. And I mean LITTLE. They're completely unreadable at highway speed. Before you write me off as some blind old fart I should say that, at 49, I'm only partly old. The unreadability isn't so much a case of bad eyes as it is vibration. Even the smoothest bike is still gonna have some shake in the bars at 80 mph and that vibration is just enough to rattle the small text on the 395LM into unreadability (I tested the unit on a 2015 Ducati Multistrada).Garmin has also made some strange choices with their map display. The 550 displayed many more street names than the 395LM does. In fact, the 395LM often only shows me the name of the road I'm currently on. Changing zoom levels does nothing to increase the number of names and this is all very curious given that the 395LM has a BIGGER screen than the 550. (See the attached photo for a comparison of map display, and note the difference in size of key interface elements.)It feels like the 395LM was designed by someone sitting in a cubicle, or design studio, who's main concern was to make a very pretty layout for the screen. They definitely achieved that – the layout and type choices are great and when you first take the thing out of the box and turn it on you'll be struck by how attractive the display is. Unfortunately, the design choices that make it pretty – empty space around key bits of data – also make it unusable at highway speed. If Garmin would offer options for text size this could be easily fixed.However, if that problem were fixed the 395LM would still be unusable for serious touring due to astonishingly bad support for GPX files. I do my route planning using the excellent site rever.com. Designed specifically for motorcycle travel, Rever lets you plan routes (using the excellent Butler Maps data) and then download a GPX of your final plan. I can simply plug the Zumo 550 into my computer, drag the downloaded GPX file into the Zumo's GPX folder, then restart and let the unit import the data. When I try the same thing on the 395LM I get a straight line from start to finish. In addition to not being the route that I wanted, since I live in San Francisco this often takes me through the Bay, which is deeper than the 395LM's stated water resistance rating.To keep things simple, I plotted a path around the block, and the 395LM still couldn't interpret it properly. Where it gets weird, though, is that I then went into Garmin's BaseCamp software and built a route. I had BaseCamp send the file directly to the 395LM. After unplugging the unit, it set about importing the file, and then said it was calculating the route. It shouldn't have to do any calculation for a route that's already spec'd out so I can only assume it was again ignoring my route and only paying attention to the start and end points. I can't say for sure because after 2 minutes of calculation the machine shut down. In other words, the 395LM's GPX support is currently so messed up that it can't even work with GPX files from Garmin's own software!As far as I'm concerned, this, alone, is reason enough to skip this model. If you can only do route planning within the unit, you're gonna have a miserable time defining your own path to where you want to go.Finally, as I mentioned earlier, I love the MP3 player in my 550. The interface is a little weak but having access to an MP3 player that can work with motorcycle gloves is great for those boring stretches of road. Unfortunately, the 395LM's MP3 player has some big problems. First, volume occasional suddenly cuts from time to time – not mutes, but just gets quieter. Then, just as suddenly it will come back. I keep all the voice prompt volume turned down so I wonder if what's going on is that it's muting the music when it wants to speak, even though I've told it not to talk.Though annoying, I could deal with that problem except that the Zumo 395LM's audio quality is TERRIBLE! I moved the same MP3 files that I listen to on the 550 into the 395LM and they sound tinny and hollow. I don't expect great fidelity while riding a motorcycle, that's not the problem. This is a fidelity loss that makes things hard to hear. Podcasts suffer especially. I use Bose noise cancelling ear buds in my helmet and with the Zumo 550 I can listen to NPR podcasts at highway speed with the volume at about 50% and can understand every word. With the 395LM cranked up to near 100% the tinny sound was so weak that I struggled to hear the content while traveling at highway speeds.At this point I find myself confused. In its current state, the unit is not usable for serious touring – the lack of reliable GPX support is a deal-breaker. Also, I want a good MP3 player. But these plainly seem to be software issues so if there's a chance that Garmin will fix them then I'd be inclined to hang on to the unit. But, my window for returning is closing so I'm not sure it's worth the risk. While I try to decide, though, the 395LM will be staying at home and the Zumo 550 will go back on my bike.UPDATE 4-24-2016: I've managed to get GPX files working. It turns out the unit sees them as Tracks, not Trips ("Trips" appears to be the current Garmin vocabulary for "route".) After copying the GPX file to the 395LM, go to Apps > Tracks and you should see it listed there. Select it, then hit the Wrench icon and you'll get a menu that includes "Convert To Trip." This will turn it into a route and throw it into the trip planner. Unfortunately, the limited number of street names on the map, tiny details and HORRIBLE MP3 player still make this a 1-star product for me. (I just took a ride with my Zumo 550 and navigation was much easier, thanks to the greater detail and bigger widgets and the MP3 player actually has bass! I was listening through the same headphones as on the 395LM – so it's definitely the 395 that is the problem.)UPDATE 4-29-2016: I returned the 395LM and bought the 595LM. For the most part, it's the same software as the 395LM, which means the same trouble with small typefaces. Uploading custom GPX's is working fine as long as I save them from rever.com as tracks and then convert them to trips inside the unit. The iPhone MP3 control via Bluetooth is great, and the ability to get notifications from the phone on the Zumo screen is really cool. As with the 395LM there are things in the 595 that I strongly prefer over my 550. It boots up very quickly, finds satellites very quickly, imports faster, connects to the computer faster – I love lane assist. The deal breaker with the 395LM was the terrible MP3 quality, so I'm happy to report that audio on the 595LM sounds GREAT! Whether playing from the internal media card or streaming from the phone via Bluetooth, the sound quality is incredibly rich and bassy.The audio quality is so good that it makes it a real tragedy that the screen is so bad.Do engineering teams at Garmin not talk to each other? How can the 395LM have a very nice screen and lousy audio and the 595 have the exact opposite problem? And how is it that this $900 GPS has a screen that is dramatically harder to read than my old 550? With the brightness on the 595LM set to 100% contrast is still low. Setting the unit next to the 550 it's also obvious that the older unit has MUCH better color saturation. (Also, the 550 displays street names in all upper case, which makes them easier to read.)On a bike you only have moments to glance at the GPS. You need strong black lines against bright colored backgrounds and everything on the 595LM looks washed out and weak. Between that and the small text the screen requires just enough extra time to decipher that it feels unsafe. So, once again I'm returning a Zumo. How can a company so consistently have a near-miss?