I know I'm two and a half years late chiming in on this thread, but I recently purchased a Garmin Montana 610t for off road use on the ATV. I've owned several GPS units since the 90's, starting with a Garmin 48, which still works, but the screen has lost a few lines of pixels. I also still have a Street Pilot III in one of my cars, which works perfectly. I used the GPS 48 on the trails for years, but I wanted a unit with a larger screen and more importantly, a topographic map database.
The new Montana 610t is the first touch screen unit I've owned, and it has so many more features than the older units, but realistically I'll never use most of them. Do I really need a built-in camera or wireless data sharing capabilities ??? No. But that's the way they come now.
Anyway, I had it out on the trails in Northern NH last weekend for the first time and I was quite impressed with it's performance. It already had the trails in the factory loaded map database so I didn't need to buy any additional map software. Marking waypoints was
much easier with the touchscreen unit and it allows far more text characters and icons than the older units. Acquiring the sats was nearly instantaneous when the unit was powered on, unlike the older units that sometimes took several minutes to lock up on the signals. This thing even worked
indoors, which really surprised me.
It came with an Li battery, similar to a camera battery, but it can also be used with 4 AA's.
From a full charge, I ran it down to 50% after 5 hours of use with the screen backlight continuously on at max brightness, so I'm guessing it's good for 10 hours in this mode. (I also had some AA's in my bag just in case)
Overall, I really like this unit, the display is big, bright and easy to read. The reaction time to speed and direction changes is instantaneous, and its accuracy to the map database and elevations are impressive. My only gripes are with the cluttered menus, there are just too many useless features built in, so the learning curve is a little steeper navigating through the menus to separate the wheat from the chaff.
IHMO, a lesser expensive, decontented version of this unit, with the same screen size but without all the extra bells and whistles would be a HUGE seller. Are you listening Garmin ???
BTW, I paid $379 for this unit from GPS City in Las Vegas.
Cabelas sells them for $399, and I've seen them listed online for as high as $519, so I didn't overpay for it.
![[hmmm]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/009.gif "Hmm [hmmm]")
