Montana 650t update

[+Nabrag]

I have a Montana 650t running the 2.60 software. I have read every post on the Montana and still decided to upgrade my 4 year old Gps Map 76csx. I love this new unit. Haven't really had any problems with it besides a few lock ups that I can't redo. Calibrates fine, geocaches great, maps and routing have work perfect. My question is should I upgrade the software to the new 3.0 or whatever they are at now? I don't want to mess up a good thing, but I also don't want to miss out on any new things they add to the GPSr.

 

p.s. I don't believe this went in the right topic area. sorry about that.

Edited August 23, 2011 by Nabrag

[+Gob-ler]

I have the latest running 3.10 I believe and having no issues to speak of. Each update so far has made things slowly but surely better.

[+Bullygoat29]

The only complaint I have currently is when doing a spell search. The Montana briefly shows the list currently filtered on what's typed in, for every letter pressed. Minorly annoying but livable.

[+mamoreb]

The only complaint I have currently is when doing a spell search. The Montana briefly shows the list currently filtered on what's typed in, for every letter pressed. Minorly annoying but livable.

 

I noticed the same thing - did it come with 3.10?

 

At first I thought it was a bug, then I started wondering if it is a feature, letting us check the list to see if we've spelled enough to find the item we're looking for...

[+splashy]

IF you buy a Montana BE SURE your dealer takes it back (swap) in case of calibration issues.

[+Geocass&Andy750x]

My Montana went a bit loopy with the screen calibration when I upgraded to v3.1. After a few downgrades/upgrades it eventually sorted itself out, but at one point I did think it had totally crippled it.

 

I noticed that spelling suggestion thing, it was annoying, but only happened when I upgraded for the first time before I had to mess with the downgrades. It doesn't happen anymore now. It wasn't very good either. I entered "Kra" expecting it to pull up the cache "Kramote" just down the road, but it ignored that and only pulled up "The Kray Twins" despite the "Kramote" cache being on there.

 

v2.6 worked fine for me, there were a few minor issues, but those that I can live with and none of them were fixed by v3.1. I don't think I'm going to upgrade again for a while after v3.1 sent my unit crazy until I managed to fix it. My opinion is unless the firmware specifically fixes a problem I've noticed with my Montana I won't be upgrading!

[+Gravitysmith]

I am one of the early adopters ... got a 650t as soon as I could get it shipped. Unlike the horror stories you may read, I have had only two "serious" issues so far.

 

The first was that the unit would crash when I tried taking pictures in an area of no GPS reception (surrounded by metal mesh). I contacted Garmin, they responded that they could not repeat it and asked me to update to the latest firmware. Indeed it was fixed with the firmware update. I think it was one of the updates after 2.6.

 

The other issue came this weekend when I upgraded to 3.1. Somehow the upgrade corrupted my geocache file in such a way that caused the unit to crash when I tried to view a cache log or hint. Of course I did not notice until I was out at ground zero. It always happens that way, right? Anyhow, I grabbed a few easy ones before going home and reloading the geocaches. It has worked perfectly fine since then.

 

Maybe I've been lucky (knock on wood). Maybe the horror stories just sound like a big issue because people tend to complain more than they praise and unlikely events sound very likely. Maybe something will happen to your device. Maybe it won't. Frankly there is no way to predict. Version 3.1 does fix some annoyances I ran into, and so I personally think it is worth it. Is the device perfect yet? Well, if it matters any, I don't currently know of any issues that affect the way I use it.

 

I mostly just wanted to write to balance some of the horror stories I read with my "nothing exciting" story. If you want my opinion, I say "go for it".

[+mamoreb]

Adding to Gravitysmith's post.

 

Garmin Montana is my first GPS, and I'm very satisfied.

 

The few flaws I have come across have been solved or are very minor.

 

The manual isn't very advanced (usually it won't explain what the features are, it just repeats the words on the screen), but the device is intuitive to use, and the online community is very helpful in explaining the small details that I can't make out myself.

[+Nabrag]

Think I'll upgrade to the new 3.2 that just came out. I noticed that it does fix a few of the things I thought should be better, such as the "find next geocache". I hopefully can upgrade the software without any problems as this unit has been great so far. Really hate to chance ruining a good thing, but some of the new fixes and add ons would be nice. Hope it works out. Thanks for everyones opinion on this question.