Garmin Colorado Bilingual Handheld American

Most helpful client reviews

62 of 68 persons found the following review helpful.
Good Unit But...
By Cheryl McMurray
I have used this GPS on hikes with navigational requirements and just ordinary testing. These are my conclusions after a few calls to Garmin Support and searching GPS forums. The good news is that it is well constructed, has a heap of features. If you buy the city, topo, and marine mapping, you may in all likelihood do it all. It has a reasonably basic ease of operation (after you get the settings customized). The bad news is that the manual is way too usual and if you want to do basic habit setups, you might have to call Tech Support but the unit is so new that even they don't always know the answers (do not e-mail them questions, call instead. Much better support). That's were the GPS forums may come in handy. The troubles I have encountered is introductory and foremost how difficult it may be to view the screen outside (especially topo detail) unless you have the sun shining directly on it. The backlight under low light conditions (shade, early morning hours) outside will not help. The altimeter does not seem to be the most exact at times and when you have the unit turned off, drive to a new location, turn it on, the altitude may now and again still read your last emplacement until you recalibrate it. Even with it set to automati calibrate and full satellite bars. NMHI rechargeable batteries do not work well with this unit if you value the backlight. There is a bug in their firmware (hopefully they will get it fixed soon) that will turn the backlight off permanently after a very short time and in a lot of cases, that I have been reading, wholly shut the unit off even when the batteries have a full charge. Some persons have had difficulties with the current time not updating even after the GPS has locked into satellites and have been told to return the unit for an exchange, but mine has worked fine. The manual tells you how to access settings but gives no detail as to what the settings mean, leaving you to experiment, dig, without intention find what you want, or call tech aid for even basic things as transferring archived (saved) tracks to your PC, transferring topo map detail, or deleting archived tracks. Some of the things I have cited are bugs that will hopefully get resolved with firmware updates but right now, I may only moderately commend this GPS. It has taken me a lot of time playing with this unit, experimenting, calling tech support, and reading blogs to operate it to my gratification (minus the bugs).

See all 26 client reviews...