Garmin Oregon 600

A Workable Touchscreen Trail GPS!

While touch screens work well on street GPS receivers, I've always preferred trail receivers with buttons. I've found touch screen trail GPS units to be unresponsive, hard to see in bright sun, and completely unusable with gloves. Marking my current position as a waypoint, which I'm constantly doing as I map trails, is a pain on older touchscreens. In the past I haven't been a believer in touchscreen trail GPS receivers. The new Garmin Oregon 600 is making a dent in that belief.

I just received the new Garmin Oregon 600 touchscreen GPS to test. (I buy test units at retail, by the way.) The 600's screen is bright, sharp and has good contrast, even in bright sun. The screen is made of the same crystal clear hard plastic as the 62 series and new eTrex series, instead of having a fuzzy plastic protective layer like the Oregon 400 series. There's a customizable user button that marks waypoints by default and can programmed to select three different actions when single-clicked, double-clicked, or held. The power button can also be programmed when single or double-clicked. (Holding the power button turns the Oregon on or off.)

Like most Garmin trail GPS receivers, the Oregon 600's screens are very customizable. You can choose from pre-configured "profiles" such as recreational, geocaching, marine, fitness, etc. You can even choose "classic" if you want to make the 600 work like the 400 (yuck). Then you can change individual screens to customize the current profile, and you can create and name new profiles.

The multi-touch screen is snappy and responsive, and quickly changes orientation from portrait to landscape when you rotate the unit. By the way, it will do landscape both ways, but portrait only in the upright position. Pinch-zooming is supported on maps, as is two-fingered rotation. The screen is responsive when wearing thin-ish liner gloves, such as you'd wear in cool conditions or under warmer gloves or mittens on cold conditions. You can't use it with heavy gloves, however.

Like the new eTrex series (10, 20, and 30), the Oregon 400-series uses the Russian GLONASS satellites as well as the FAA's Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). While this does improve accuracy, the main benefit is having 12 more satellite channels (for a total of 24) that can be received simultaneously. In difficult conditions such as heavy forest or deep canyons, this could mean the difference between having a navigation lock or not. At the moment, I have the Oregon 600, eTrex 30, and 62s running on my desk. Under the wooden roof of my house, which seems to be a pretty good approximation of moderate forest cover, the 62s is locked onto 6 satellites, is not receiving WAAS signals, and claims accuracy of about 40 feet. The eTrex 30 is locked onto 11 GPS satellites, 10 GLONASS satellites, is receiving WAAS, and claims about 30 feet. The Oregon 4600 is receiving 5 GPS satellites, 6 GLONASS satellites, is receiving WAAS, and also claims about 30 feet.

Of course, the Oregon 600 has a tilt-compensated magnetic compass which works when you're standing still, as well as a barometric altimeter. Geocachers will like the fact that the number of paperless geocaching files is limited only by the available memory, which can be expanded with microSD cards.

All right, I will admit that I still like the button interface on the 62 series for its usability in all conditions, but I look forward to putting the Oregon 400 through its paces in the field. If you prefer a touchscreen trail GPS, you will like the Oregon 400.

The Oregon 650 adds a camera and more memory to the 600, while the 600t and 650t add pre-loaded topographic maps. I recommend the models without pre-loaded topo maps because you can get better maps for free from gpsfiledepot.com.

There are many other new features, especially for track management and for geocachers, than I have space to cover here. Please see the detailed review at GPS Tracklog: gpstracklog.com/2013/05/garmin-oregon-650-review.html for much more information.

Order from Amazon: Garmin Oregon 600 3-Inch Worldwide Handheld GPS