January 2009
A couple of “crossover” products made their first UK appearances on Garmin’s London Boat Show stand.
One was the GPSMap 620. Even now, I’m not sure whether it’s a big in-car navigator or a small chart plotter. The name, coupled with the fact that it’s waterproof and can accept Garmin’s Bluechart G2 mapping suggest the latter, while features such as the touch-screen control, postcode search facility and turn-by turn voice guidance suggest the former.
The fact is, of course, that it’s both. For £700 you get a 5.2-inch WVGA display that is as at home in a car as on a boat, and that automatically switches between the two when moved from one bracket to the other.
If the GPSmap 620 has
a dual
personality, the three members of the Oregon range fit an entire cast
of
characters into even smaller packages, to suit sailors, canoeists,
walkers,
cyclists and even golfers. All three – the 200, 300, and 400T – fit easily into the
palm of a hand, are waterproof, and can handle any of several different
kinds
of mapping – including vector charts and road maps, and bitmapped
raster maps such as Ordnance Survey maps
for walkers and
cyclists. Prices will probably depend as much on where you buy as on the facilities you require, but the list starts at £279.99 for the basic Oregon 200, rising to £399.99 for the 400T, with a built in compass, altimeter, and 1:100,000 European topographic mapping.
www.garmin.co.uk
