Baaad News! :-(

[colirv]

From another site - the “U” stands for Unicode, and the NTU maps include Unicode text encoding for enhanced language support. However only newer Garmin devices have support for Unicode, so Garmin continues to provide NT maps with standard text encoding for the older devices.

[Tiga1050]

From another site - the “U” stands for Unicode, and the NTU maps include Unicode text encoding for enhanced language support. However only newer Garmin devices have support for Unicode, so Garmin continues to provide NT maps with standard text encoding for the older devices.

OK, that makes sense. Thank you.
If I buy a brand new XT2 today it ships with City Navigator Europe NTU installed and presumably Garmin wouldn't be selling new product with obsolete maps. So hopefully the NTU updates will continue and it's the older NT version which will cease.
Fingers crossed!

[sussamb]

Yes, as explained all newer devices in the EU come with EU NTU maps, so stopping the updates for the NT map only affects those with much older devices.

[lkraus]

In North America, the Zumo XT uses NT maps, so it can use either type of map. Since the primary languages here (English, French, and Spanish) use the "Latin" alphabet, they do not require "enhanced" support to properly show street names.

Using the 8-bit Latin alphabet, an NT map could display up to 256 characters. I have not found which version of Unicode is used for NTU maps. The earliest Unicode version had over 7200 characters, the current "standard" has 149,000, and over a million characters are possible.