Question about upcoming Bushnell ONIX 400CR

[+aka Monkey]

I've seen some mention of the upcoming ONIX 400CR fom Bushnell, which looks very cool. However I was curious whether anyone knows whether it offers turn-by-turn driving directions the way the Garmin units do. If it does, it's starting to look a bit like a Garmin killer to me.

 

I gather that the satellite maps use a special .pho format that you can drag-and-drop onto the SD card to install. If that's true, then you could potentially subscribe to their service for a single year (just long enough to download all the maps you need) and then let your subscription expitre until you feel like updating again.

[+MN-CACHE-TRACKER]

I've seen some mention of the upcoming ONIX 400CR fom Bushnell, which looks very cool. However I was curious whether anyone knows whether it offers turn-by-turn driving directions the way the Garmin units do. If it does, it's starting to look a bit like a Garmin killer to me.

 

I gather that the satellite maps use a special .pho format that you can drag-and-drop onto the SD card to install. If that's true, then you could potentially subscribe to their service for a single year (just long enough to download all the maps you need) and then let your subscription expitre until you feel like updating again.

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All the features in the world wont make it a GARMIN killer. It first has to work, be reliable, and be fixable if it does break, and have good tec support. If it does all this then GARMIN may loose sales, we will all have to wait and see..

[+team5150]

That is a very impressive looking unit! Be interested to see it when actually comes out.

[+aka Monkey]

All the features in the world wont make it a GARMIN killer. It first has to work, be reliable, and be fixable if it does break, and have good tec support. If it does all this then GARMIN may loose sales, we will all have to wait and see..

 

I'm not too concerned about most of those. Bushnell has a good reputation and has been around for many years. Whether their support is any good remains to be seen. But the unit offers features that seem a long way away from what Garmin currently offers, and IMHO the interface looks much better than Garmin's (and oodles better than Magellan's). The 360 x 240 resolution ought to be beautiful compared to the 160 x 240 that Garmin offers on the 60CX.

 

Regardless, I'm happy to see there's another serious player in the mix. Garmin has been resting on their laurels a bit on my opinion. They're very slow to come out with significant model updates (HOW long did it take them to add MicroSD card support?), and they haven't offered anything really innovative in the GPS market for a while. Color screens? Bleah, cell phones have had them for years. More memory? Heck, an iPod Shuffle has oodles more memory than what comes in the Garmin units. Competition will do nothing but spur everyone to innovate, and hopefully bring prices down as well. Look at what Apple has done to the computer market. Before the iMac everything was beige boxes, and now the other computer makers are scrambling to keep up.