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Just Got a Garmin Colorado 300


Didjerrydo

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I am the "GPS guy" at a local outdoor outfitter here in Western North Carolina and we just got in the first Colorado 300's yesterday. I've got to admit, they're pretty slick although out of the 3 units that came in, one failed. It initially booted up and acquired fine, then on the next attempt, it just failed to acquire- on the second attempt to boot up, it acted as though it was in the "GPS Off" mode and would not acquire. I hope this isn't indicative of the units as a whole!

I am currently wrestling with loading City Navigator into it (which is usually a pain at best, due to all the security hassels. I was a bit dissapointed to see that you can only zoom in to the 80 foot scale on the map page. I thought that was a bit wierd since this is such a hi-res display. Wonder what Garmin was thinking there?

It's good to see that Garmin has brought back both the "Alarm Clock" and the ability to plot barometric pressure with the unit turned off. These features were both missing in the 60Cx & 60CSx units.

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If you ck the posts, once you load CN you will notice that the street names do not show up in CN as of the latest updates on Garmin's site. We hope this will be fixed. You cant average a point for higher accuracy when setting up a geocache at this time. The caches do not display at this time on the map (Garmin is we hope working on a fix and there is a workaround for this). Check the forums...they have a few issues...its normal for start up on a new unit. We hope that fixes will be implemented for these problems, and they will come out in soon. Garmin has been good at responding tho not fast enough for some of us. Its to bad beta testing did not bring out more of the problems before launch. But if you look here http://www.gpsinformation.org/allory/new.htm you will see they have been busy of late with updating. I think the unit has lots of potential and I hope they will listen as they have in the past and address the concerns, one of the latest is panning and having the unit go from track up to north up...minor in some respects...but if I'm using track up I would want the unit to pan that way (say if I'm facing south) not having the unit switch to north up and have to change my orientation to figure out where I want to go, its doable but WHY? Personal preference I guess but it seams strange to have to change your orientation when you set the unit for track up and then have to switch thinking to north up, each to his own though. Id want the option to Keep it the way I have it set NOT change as this takes time for the unit to do and then change back. Enjoy..Garmin could have a real winner here if they address the problems and can correct them.

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I have played with my 300 for a day now and have come to a few conclusions.....

 

1. It just isn't designed for in-car routing. Akward at best with buttons, layout etc. Works great for outdoor use.

 

2. The Geocaching problems - are just not all that bad. I was loading the caches into the GPS and then copying the GPX file to my PDA. Now I can load the GPX into the 300 and then load up to 1000 caches as waypoints. They show up on the map and I can see all the listing details. The only bad thing is the inability to mark as found and goto next.

 

3. Battery life isn't bad.

 

4. USB storage mode. Again - I accept that this unit was designed to be carried outdoors and was not designed as an unit to transfer my current position to a PC. No problems here.

 

Overall I have faith that a service release will cure the few problems I am seeing. Not a bad little GPS - certain does the job very well - just needs some tweaks.

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I have played with my 300 for a day now and have come to a few conclusions.....

 

1. It just isn't designed for in-car routing. Akward at best with buttons, layout etc. Works great for outdoor use.

 

2. The Geocaching problems - are just not all that bad. I was loading the caches into the GPS and then copying the GPX file to my PDA. Now I can load the GPX into the 300 and then load up to 1000 caches as waypoints. They show up on the map and I can see all the listing details. The only bad thing is the inability to mark as found and goto next.

 

3. Battery life isn't bad.

 

4. USB storage mode. Again - I accept that this unit was designed to be carried outdoors and was not designed as an unit to transfer my current position to a PC. No problems here.

 

Overall I have faith that a service release will cure the few problems I am seeing. Not a bad little GPS - certain does the job very well - just needs some tweaks.

 

Like Starbrand I have had my 300 for a day now and I have a few conclusions about the 300 so far.

 

1. I agree with it not being designed for-car routing but that may be just because it is different from the operation of the 60CS that I was use to using. I do like the way it works when I am on foot though.

 

2. I had a little problem loading caches into the 300 at first but I did finally get caches to load after some experimenting but I am still new at this too. I do like the fact that I can put them on my 300 and not carry a PDA. I wish that the caches could be marked as found but I can work around that for now.

 

3. The first set of "throw away" batteries I put in the 300 showed up as discharged in what I thought was a very short time and after checking them with a battery tester they were not even close to dead. After I put in a set of rechargeable batteries I didn't have a problem with them showing up prematurely dead.

 

4. I have a Streetpilot C530 and it uses similar ways to transfer things so I could not see a major problem with that either.

 

5. I do wish the street names would show on the screen instead of not showing up.

 

I also hope that a firmware update will take care of some of the problems. There are several features on the 300 I may never use or use very little but I am glad they are there just in case I do ever want t use them.

 

These are just my first impressions and maybe in time I will think differently.

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An Update of your Colorado will solve some issues

 

Changes made from version 2.30 to 2.40:

 

Improved acquisition time in certain circumstances.

Improved power on time.

Improved backlight support.

Improved support for NiMH batteries.

Improved Wherigo player.

Added ability to show and review geocaches on the map.

Added ability to log geocaches as found.

Increased maximum geocache count to 2000.

Added support for BlueChart currents.

Added ability to view extended information for custom POI's.

Added ability for turn preview beep to reset the backlight timeout.

Corrected map to display road labels.

Corrected map to display small towns.

Corrected map to not change orientation when beginning pan mode.

Corrected metric nautical setting to display appropriate map scale.

Support for Colorado Field Notes, at geocaching.com.

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:D Am I missing anything here on my Legend CX when I was geocacheing and using TOPO mapping when I was going to a find I had the choice of On road or Off road IE: so you could still use the Mapping to get you close to the cache by road with your Garmin giving directions, I can't see to do this with the Colorado 300 (or can you)

 

Thanks for any advice

 

:D:D:D

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