Hands on with the new Oregon 550 as we go geocaching with the Garmin crew.
When we reviewed
Garmin's
Oregon 400t earlier this year we were impressed
with the overall technology of the unit but less than blown away by its
OS mapping capabilities, didn't like its screen readability in sunlight
and thought it was needlessly complicated with a lot of functions and
menus that you don't really need for outdoors navigation use.
Fast forward six months or so and we're sitting in a car park at the
top of Box Hill with various Garmin folk, lots of small boxes full of
GPS electronics, a fair few bikes and our colleagues from BIKEmagic and
RCUK with their pukka road exotica and assorted cross-dressing bikes.
The idea was to use some of the latest Garmin units with some gentle
input from Garmin and, of course, for the specialist bike journos to
grind each other into the dirt in a frenzy of competitiveness. We chose
to sit that one out, armed as we were with a heavy steel behemoth shod
with slow-rolling semi-slicks.
Hello Oregon 550
Anyway, after an enjoyable morning of road riding and the ignominy of
being dropped and left to die in the middle of nowhere, a brand
spanking new Oregon 550 mysteriously appeared on my handlebars and we
went geocaching.
New Oregon 550 features
geo-tagged on-board camera.
The 550 differs from the 400t we tested mainly in having a built-in
camera that can also store location data for each snap you take to make
geo-tagging straightforward. As with the 400t you can install OS
mapping on a microSD card and this is now available to cover the UK in
three regions at 1:50,000 scale - southern and northern England and
Scotland - all at £119.99 - or half price when bought with an
Oregon or a Dakota.
Like the other Oregons, the 550 is intended as a multi-activity unit
which you can use for walking, biking and sailing and will also, if you
choose, double as a road navigation unit to get your to the start of
your activity.
It's 100% touch screen and the interface is pretty much unchanged. That
means there are dozens of icons, hierarchical menus and annoyingly,
still no reset button on the trip computer screen, grrrr...
OS mapping still doesn't display as clearly as it does on a Satmap or
an iPhone for that matter, but to be fair, it's useable and the screen
does seem to be clearer in sunlight and we were able to read it
reasonably consistently during the course of the afternoon.
Geo-caching
And geo-caching - more about it on the
Garmin
web site - since you ask, turned out to be
surprisingly good fun and showcased the capabilities of the Oregon
extremely well - most of the others were armed with Dakota units, which
we view as a snack-sized Oregon with a smaller screen.
Mapping reproductions
still less distinct than the competition,
though it's hard to tell
from this image.
Racing along bridleways on bike looking for hidden caches the
specialist geo-caching function - which guides you from point to point
and sounds an alarm when you're on top of the cache was impressive -
and it would make a great family outing.
Just how it relates to more general outdoors use we're not sure. The
screen is still a little too small to get a decent overall view of an
area - zoom out and the map's too small to read, zoom in and you can't
see what's around you - and we still have misgivings about the clarity
of the OS mapping reproduction.
We still find the menu system clunky for all its neat little icons -
just a minute ago we failed miserably to work out how to get out of GPS
demo mode - though familiarity may improve that somewhat.
So, in short, for now the jury is still out. We're going to use the
Oregon 550 on our local hills and report back. Big thanks to Garmin for
a cracking day out. And watch out bicycle people, next time I'll be
armed with a proper bike...
Jon
