12/18/2011

Garmin Colorado 300 Bilingual Handheld GPS Unit with North American Maps Review

Garmin Colorado 300 Bilingual Handheld GPS Unit with North American Maps
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(More customer reviews)
I have used this GPS on hikes with navigational requirements and just general testing. These are my conclusions after a few calls to Garmin Support and searching GPS forums. The good news is that it is well constructed, has many features. If you buy the city, topo, and marine mapping, you can probably do it all. It has a fairly basic ease of operation (after you get the settings customized). The bad news is that the manual is way too general and if you want to do basic custom setups, you might have to call Tech Support but the unit is so new that even they don't always know the answers (do not e-mail them questions, call instead. Much better support). That's were the GPS forums can come in handy. The problems I have encountered is first and foremost how difficult it can be to view the screen outside (especially topo detail) unless you have the sun shining directly on it. The backlight under low light conditions (shade, early morning hours) outside will not help. The altimeter does not seem to be the most accurate at times and when you have the unit turned off, drive to a new location, turn it on, the altitude can sometimes still read your last location until you recalibrate it. Even with it set to auto calibrate and full satellite bars. NMHI rechargeable batteries do not work well with this unit if you value the backlight. There is a bug in their firmware (hopefully they will get it fixed soon) that will turn the backlight off permanently after a very short time and in some cases, that I have been reading, completely shut the unit off even when the batteries have a full charge. Some people have had problems with the current time not updating even after the GPS has locked into satellites and have been told to return the unit for an exchange, but mine has worked fine. The manual tells you how to access settings but gives no detail as to what the settings mean, leaving you to experiment, dig, accidentally find what you want, or call tech support for even basic things as transferring archived (saved) tracks to your PC, transferring topo map detail, or deleting archived tracks. Some of the things I have mentioned are bugs that will hopefully get resolved with firmware updates but right now, I can only moderately recommend this GPS. It has taken me a lot of time playing with this unit, experimenting, calling tech support, and reading blogs to operate it to my satisfaction (minus the bugs).


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The Colorado 300 features a built-in worldwide basemap with shaded relief for incredibly enhanced map presentation on the unit. Optional detailed maps can also be loaded using the SD card slot or the 384 megabytes of internal memory built into the Colorado 300.

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