gctidwells

I've played with both. Get the Nuvi. It's cheaper, and easier to use for this game. Much more user friendly unit.

I spent the last couple of months reading reviews, reading threads on the 500 here in the forums, and finally bought a refurbished model on ebay ($218 w/shipping). I knew there were issues, but it looked like many of the original ones had been addressed. I've had it about a week now, and got out today with it finally to do some caching. My bottom line opinion is that, while it might night be a great hiking unit (I didn't try to use the trackback feature- probably never will), it's a GREAT crossover unit. It jumps smoothly between driving/walking modes. The geocaching features are really effective, and it was very accurate today, even in moderately heavy tree cover. It was easily the most accurate of the devices we had with us today (3 nuvi 200's and a couple of Blackberrys running Cacheberry and Geocache Navigator). The compass worked- which was one of the big complaints early on. I"m really pleased with this purchase. There are a few things that are a little cumbersome: Battery life- i got about 3 hours out of it on battery before I had to get it charging, but i don't think it was fully charged when we left. Field notes- the keyboard isn't qwerty, so it's a pain to type. Updating software- the basic update was a snap, but getting the TTS feature into it was like a backdoor secret thing. Easy to load, but you have to know what to do. If I'd easily recommend this to anyone starting out as a good multi-tasking unit. I plan to wear this thing out!

Did it sell? I might be interested...

Thanks so much for your work. I'm using the macro with my "free" Nuvi 200, and after I got used to not having a compass, and discovered that it gives me distance to the cache in "off road" mode, it works every bit as well as my explorist. In fact, I did a multi-cache today, and I think the Nuvi is easier to input coordinates by hand in the field! It's as close to paperless as you can get right now, methinks! tftw (thanks for the work) gctidwells