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Garmin Colorado Night Mode - work around for those interested


yogazoo

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After owning the Colorado 300 for over 3 months now I have completely forgotten about night mode. As we all know the Garmin Colorado series of handheld GPS's comes without this feature. I wanted to see how "cool" it would be to have night-mode on the Colorado so I did the following rather simple steps.

 

1a) made a custom basemap consisting of a single shapefile of the entire state of Montana.

2a) wrote a TYP coloring the basemap black.

 

1b) Made a custom transparent road layer from Tiger2008 data to overlay on top of the Basemap.

 

When I went for a drive that night I loaded the layers and I remembered just how much this feature helps with night viewing/navigation. The glare is eliminated and the roads are SOOOO much easier to see.

 

9cd21288-2370-4c27-9cd3-5f43e1bf3787.jpgfffd5421-5d05-4d4a-866e-4c15af7ce4e1.jpg999bced3-b9e3-4cb2-8f75-be2136e6476b.jpg

 

From what I remember My Mom had night mode on her Nuvi, the older color handhelds all had night mode, why would the Colorado be the ONLY Garmin GPS without it? I realized how much I miss this feature and called Garmin to ask them to consider it in a future update. If I can do it in my "garage" it shouldn't be that difficult to implement. Right?

 

I'm not sure if it's on the Wiki as a desired feature or not but I feel that maybe it's warranted. What does everyone else think? I know, I know, want in one hand and %#$@ in the other.

Edited by yogazoo
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nice pics - but i am sure garmin will not change it (and i am sorry about that)

I thought garmin would implement more features afters having the unit some months on the market.

there was plenty of time to do so.

the co might be a nice unit for caching, but for biking, hiking (and other activities) the gpsmap-series and vista series will be the best choice.

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I am not sure if the night mode does anything for me. Its just a background color change?

When it is dark and rainy, a bright GPS screen, could cause you to crash, because of the glare, so it is important to keep glare down, and to be able to keep your vision, dark adjusted, as if you were searching for faint objects in the night sky with a telescope.

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Its just a background color change?

 

Right, simply a background color change. Easy enough for Garmin to implement if they wanted to. It makes a huge difference to me. Not only does it allow your vision to stay night adjusted, it allows for roads to be more easily seen.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb here to say that Garmin WILL probably implement this in the future. If you look at how colors are represented on the Colorado it seems as though Garmin went through great lengths to avoid using black colors. What black they do use is always halo'ed in white. That just says to me that they were/are planning to incorporate the night mode at some point. The grey color scheme of the roads is more difficult to see than if they would have colored them black.

 

I'm not sure whats going on with the firmware/software updates to the Colorado anyway. They just seem to be either dragging their feet or giving up on improving/debugging the operational aspects of these units altogether. Maybe I'm just impatient, but the last release was "weak sauce" and the one before that was nearly two months ago.

 

ADDED: I agree with FREEDAY in that these units seem to be focused around geocaching. If you want a unit for biking/fitness get something else. If you want a unit for serious hiking and navigating, get something else. The Colorado will be usable for these but just not the best option in my opinion. Contrary to their advertising of the CO.

Edited by yogazoo
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The graphics are the same as those on the nüvi for example, which to me says they don't necessarily plan on implementing the night mode rather copied the files over to this format.

 

Would it be nice? Sure.

Can I live without it? You bet. I'd pesonally rather see them hashing out functionality issues (such as auto changing maps with profiles and the backlight some have problems with) than this.

 

Very cool though... how hard is it to swap back and forth?

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Not difficult at all. Its just a matter of changing the maps seen on your unit. Like switching from City Nav to Topo2008.

 

If they borrowed the color scheme from the NUVI then why the heck didn't they just include night mode like the NUVI?

 

I make a prediction. Two updates from now, the night mode feature will be implemented.

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I am not sure if the night mode does anything for me. Its just a background color change?

It's more than just a background colour change on my Summit HC. It changes the whole colour scheme, and reduces the back-light intensity as well. Each (user-selectable) colour scheme has its own background, foreground, highlight, and text colour etc. It also has an "Auto" mode, which automatically switches between daytime and nighttime mode at sunset / sunrise.

 

Overall result is that I can use the unit in my car, and automatically get a bright clear display in the daytime, and a much dimmer but still very clear display at night - not distracting or glary at all. The display automatically dims at dusk, so I don't need to press any buttons as I drive from day into night.

 

(You can also override the nighttime mode, if you want, so that you can get a brighter nighttime display when that would help.)

 

I have to say I am mystified as to why Garmin wouldn't have thought to implement this on the latest and greatest units!

Edited by julianh
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I have to say I am mystified as to why Garmin wouldn't have thought to implement this on the latest and greatest units!

 

"Mystified", as you put it, sums up perfectly alot of the feature loss in the Colorado. Unless your a geocacher, then perhaps you sing the praises of paperless caching and don't mind being shortchanged a little in other areas.

 

Mark my words. Read my lips. Write it down. Bet the farm. Garmin will have the foresight to implement night mode, fix the barometer that doesn't record data when unit is off, and add waypoint averaging, etc. After all this is Garmin, the world leader in GPSr technology and they didn't get there by doing things half-a**ed. Right?

Edited by yogazoo
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As much as I'd like to see it, I don't think you will see garmin add features, no matter how much people complain. If they do it might be one or two big ones. In the past garmin has almost never added features to units, they fix bugs and problems that's about it.

 

As others have said, it's got a nice auto mode, and I'm sure it's great for geocache use, but for field work it's subpar even compared to the etrex line there are just too many proven useful features missing from it. I'll be waiting for maybe one more firmware update, but then I'm selling mine, my only regret is my 30 days to return it is past.

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Ok, here's the theory behind my belief Garmin will add these features.

 

The Magellan Triton in all it's "glory" was release prior to the holidays. Garmin had "new unit envy" and hastened production and development of the Colorado series. This in turn is what created the hardware issues from the factory. This is also what caused the stripped down, basic, buggy, half-cooked, firware/software that we saw when the units were released. It is my firm belief that Garmin released these units so that everyone wanting the latest and greatest didn't all switch to Magellan with their "slick" Tritons.

 

The Garmin Colorado wasn't ready for prime time and one can argue that it's still not. That's why I believe that Garmin will eventually work most of the older features commonly used into the units operating system. They were in too much of a hurry to get it out the door to worry about all of the features. All we need is to do is just hang on for one or two more updates and they will include them.

 

This, my friends, is my dream. Please don't awaken me from it, thinking this way helps me deal with the fact that I sold my 60CSX for the Colorado. It gives me hope. Hope is all I have left for the Colorado.

 

Toddm,

me and my optimistic view of the world will cling to these hopes for TWO more updates. If certain features are not addressed, I'm afraid I will be firing up my eBay account to fund the purchase of my second 60CSX. The item description will read "Great GPS unit for Geocachers!"

Edited by yogazoo
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Ok, here's the theory behind my belief Garmin will add these features.

 

The Magellan Triton in all it's "glory" was release prior to the holidays. Garmin had "new unit envy" and hastened production and development of the Colorado series. This in turn is what created the hardware issues from the factory. This is also what caused the stripped down, basic, buggy, half-cooked, firware/software that we saw when the units were released. It is my firm belief that Garmin released these units so that everyone wanting the latest and greatest didn't all switch to Magellan with their "slick" Tritons.

 

The Garmin Colorado wasn't ready for prime time and one can argue that it's still not. That's why I believe that Garmin will eventually work most of the older features commonly used into the units operating system. They were in too much of a hurry to get it out the door to worry about all of the features. All we need is to do is just hang on for one or two more updates and they will include them.

 

This, my friends, is my dream. Please don't awaken me from it, thinking this way helps me deal with the fact that I sold my 60CSX for the Colorado. It gives me hope. Hope is all I have left for the Colorado.

 

Toddm,

me and my optimistic view of the world will cling to these hopes for TWO more updates. If certain features are not addressed, I'm afraid I will be firing up my eBay account to fund the purchase of my second 60CSX. The item description will read "Great GPS unit for Geocachers!"

 

You might be right, Garmin may just have been in a hurry to get the CO onto the shelves. But even with the new interface, how much extra work would it really have taken to include more of the 60's features?

 

Unfortunately, I think it is much more likely that Garmin has made a deliberate decision to keep the 60 marketable by not fully replacing it with the CO - at least for now. Why sell one fantastic device now when you can encourage consumers to purchase multiple devices over the next few years? The movie industry is a perfect example - they release a stripped-down DVD to start, then the "special edition" a year later.

 

I wouldn't hold you breath for a big feature update to the CO anytime soon. At best, maybe Garmin will spoon feed us one new feautre every few months (the first was the ability to reposition waypoints).

 

The other thing to consider is that CO's hardware, particularly the MediaTek chipset, is far from proven. I just don't think the CO is a smart choice unelss you've got to have that paperless geocaching!

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