What's It For?
We've already carried a first look at Garmin's Oregon 300 GPS unit and the 400t is very similar, albeit with some added features, but the real interest with the 400t was that it came complete with Garmin's new GB Discoverer map of the Peak District.
It's a full topographic. 1:50,000/1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map on a microSD card and while Satmap has been doing the same thing for over a year now, this is the first time either Garmin or Magellan has given users the option of having a real OS map on their screen instead of a topo or basemap.
The Garmin GB Discoverer maps cover National Parks and Trails only in both 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 form and cost £129.99. The pack also includes data which allows full turn by turn navigation in the UK. The Vector mapping accounts for the limited coverage and the cost.
The unit uses a touch screen interface and a neat icon-based navigation system that at first look is a lot more user friendly than traditional GPS units with their relentlessly user-hostile interface.
The Techy Bits
We' re not going to get obsessed with the technical minutae here, ultimately we're interested in how well the Oregon works as a real world outdoors navigation tool, but there are some stand-out features that are worth pointing out.
The Oregon uses a Transflective color TFT touchscreen, which you operate with your finger, gloved or not, the only button is the on / off one. Nice and simple.
Next, the unit has raster and vector mapping. The latter means that it can navigate you, on the road, step by step to any number of stored points of interest from the local Italian restaurant, to an airport or, more usefully, to the start point of your walk. In effect you can use it as a car-type Satnav, though thankfully it won't talk to you...
Finally a microSD card slot nestling behind the batteries, allows you to load additional mapping and storage capacity, in our case the 1:50,000 OS map of the Peak District.
How It Performed
Initally the Oregon 400t was a little overwhelming. Dig into the easy to access, icon-based menu and you'll find it can do pretty much anything short of making the tea and toat. There are no fewer than three pages of options ranging from the obvious - 'Map' to stuff like stopwatches, calendars and a calculator. A lot of this you can simply ignore.
The Oregon is based on a completely different rationale to the Satmap Active 10. While the Satmap has been designed from the ground up to work with OS mapping, it's the complete reason for its existence, the Oregon is basically a very refined traditional GPS unit with a more coherent interface with bolt-on OS mapping.
That means you can do everything you'd expect from a Garmin GPS unit in terms of uploading and downoading tracks, GPX files and so on, but you'll see it all on an on-screen OS map. What you don't get is a unit that's anything like as self contained as an Active 10.
That's fine in that you're getting a good GPS unit with knobs on, but it's really let down by the screen and the way the mapping appears on it. For starters, the screen is just too small to see enough of the mapped area. Next, it's nigh on impossible to read in anything resembling sunlight, even at full brightness, which burns batteries for fun. Finally, the mapping itself is horribly blurry. Apparently this is down to the unit overlaying different mapping layers, but even with the latest software update installed, it's still not as clear as we'd like.
That's a shame because when you can see it, it does work reasonably well with a clear directional position indicator and a neat black line to represent your track. We had the odd grouse with the interface too. So far the touch screen works well, even with gloves and in wet conditions, but there are so many options and they're not always obvious.
For example, you'd think the trip computer reset would be easy to locate and should be on the trip computer screen, but no, it's buried in 'Setup' some four touches away.
Other aspects work really well. Our unit seemed to acquire a GPS fix really quickly. It downloaded routes in GPX form and direct from some mapping web sites easily and quickly via its USB port and displayed them clearly.
We were also impressed with the way you can use the unit as a sat-nav in the car, where it did work reasonably well and with the endless lists of potential destinations including restaurants, pubs, petrol stations and so on. We would, however, happily have swapped them for a bigger, brighter, clearer screen and mapping that displayed more sharply.
Verdict
In some ways the Oregon 400t is massively impressive. The interface isn't perfect, but the touch screen and icon-based menu are far better than other GPS units we've used. We do have reservations over the longterm durability of the screen, however only time will tell on that count. We like the vector mapping satnav capabilities as well and the compatability with mapping software and computers including Macs.
Unfortunately the OS mapping comes across as being a bit of a bolt-on, it displays blurrily, the screen is too small and very hard to read in any sort of sunlight and keeping the brightness level high took its toll on battery life. Use it like a traditional GPS with added OS-ness and you'll be fine, but don't expect to be able to get the full benefit of the mapping in the way you would with an Active 10.
Buy if... you're after a traditional do-it-all GPS unit with a better interface that will allow you to navigate to the trailhead on the road then see your route displayed on an OS map and you don't walk much in bright, summer conditions.
