Missing so many basic features for a Navigation Assist app to aid a $300 – Garmin Smartphone Link Review

I bought a $300 Garmin GPS that is largely dependent on phone pairing to use all of the features, so I expected much more from the app and its almost useless. Garmin struggles to maintain the usefulness of a stand alone GPS, and this app is a key part of their struggle. All of the Garmin experience is lost due to putting no investment into this application where if their hardware was paired appropriately it would be an easy decision to continue purchasing automotive gpses, unfortunately Garmin continues to fail. Pros: 1) It can auto sync your saved points in your GPS. 2) It has some subscription options including traffic and traffic cam, if you feel one needs it. though a lot of these are dependent on cell phone data plans and stuff that other apps give for lesser cost. 3) It acts as a link between 4 Square and TripAdvisor and so you can get info on the waypoints on the gps on the screen if you think those features are worth while. 4) It can act as the link for crash notification/ emergency notification in the event the gps believes there was a crash to designated contact 5) It can sync with your contact addresses but they dont make it clear where these go (such as the Garmin cloud) so until I figure that out I wont use it. Cons: 1) You cannot sync or plan trips in the phone. This alone should be the #1 feature of this app but it doesn't exist. Instead I have have manually plot a two week road trip using the hoaky location lookup features of the GPS. This really negates from the value of a stand alone GPS if I can do in less than 5 min in RouteTo app that takes me over a half hour in the GPS because this app lacks even basic routing beyond A-B destinations. 2) Find location, even on your phone, only works locally so if you are looking for a location outside your local area you are out of luck. 3) Save location and syncing location with the GPS is not user friendly and overly time consuming for such a simple function. This makes 1 & 2 even worse. 4) If you do not change in both the app and gps your ‘anonymous’ location last routes will be synced and shared with Garmin. 5) Pick a location while unlike find location doesnt constrain you to the local area picking a location COMPLETELY lacks detail and scrolling is slow.. and there is no search... So think pick a city on a map of the US on a wire grid of the US and hope you arent more than 50 miles off. 6) It feels like it has no integration with your phones maps to assist in your lookup in pick your location or finding locations for trip planning. 7) You cannot build a route in another app (including Garmins own) and upload a route to your gps.
Review by crsouser on Garmin Smartphone Link.