Colorado 300 came in today!

Initial impressions of the Colorado 300.
Most of the comparison will be with my trusty 60CSx. The
Colorado has a very slightly larger screen, mostly in height.
Overall it is about one inch (30cm) shorter with the same width
and depth. Right off the bat I HATE the carabineer clip. My use
of the unit is either stationary in the vehicle or on my belt
until needed. The strap on the thing has it hanging several
inches below the belt line and flopping all over the place. I
had a button for the 60CSx type belt clip and am gorilla gluing
it on to the back of the case as I type this. The other
complaint about this silly clip is that it must be removed from
the case to change batteries or SD card.
The display is a higher resolution than the 60CSx and very easy
to read. I have not had a chance to get it in the car for a
drive yet and am interested to see how the backlight level is
for night driving.
I placed a blank formatted SD card in the unit and tried to do a
mapsource download to the GPSr. Unlike the 60 it tried to put
the map into the onboard memory, not the SD card. To get the
maps on the SD card I had to hit the dropdown box to find where
XP had assigned the card as an external drive. The
experimentation I have done so far with the maps has revealed a
feature that I always wanted on the 60, that is to be able to
turn on or off a full map set. It looks like I'll be able to
keep City Nav on the SD card and put the Topo segments I use
most into the local memory, turning them on and off at will. I
was able do this with the 60 but had to remember what map
segments correlated. That is a pain with a 2G card and several
hundred map names.
I'll try to follow up with some more observations after I play
with the new toy for a few days.
Well first real bug…… The unit will not use external power! When
it is plugged in to the USB cable it thinks it is passing data
to or from the computer. I'll be calling Garmin in the morning
on that little problem.

Mac

Ok, Called Garmin first thing this morning.

UNHAPPY CUSTOMER!

If you are planning to use this thing in the vehicle, either
plan on taking a truck load of batteries with you if you want
real time tracking (more on this later) or buy their PROPRIARARY
USB power cable. A standard USB power cable like I have been
using on my 60CSX will not work.

To do real time tracking, you will need their USB to serial
cable that does NOT power the unit. If your laptop is like mine
it does not have a serial port anymore so you will need a USB to
serial converter to their serial to usb converter!

Toss all of your accessories that you already own and plan on
spending $$$$ and still having a compromise.

Garmin (to their credit) was going to "work with me" to send me
either the power cable or the serial cable at a reduced cost but
the tech rep couldn't even get into their own web site. I can't
see that either would do me any good. I have about 5 days to
decide whether to send this thing back or keep it. I am leaning
toward putting it back in the box and shipping it back.

The Garmin Colorado 300 (and 400, is the same thing with pre-
installed maps) is NOT ready for prime time IMHO.

If all you plan to do with it is letting it flop around on the
end of a carribiner it may work for you. I would recomend buying
a 60CSx or 76CSx for less money until they get some of the
problems worked out on this thing.

grumble grumble


Mac

Where does the power cable plug in on the unit?


So you are saying the unit cannot use a USB connection to provide real
time input to a mapping program on the laptop? What in hell were they
thinking?


Yea right! If what you have described is true I think it would be a no-
brainer to send the crap back! Does sound like you didn't really
research it thoroughly though.

The sort of complaints he is making seem like issues that would be
hard to discover without actually having the unit and attempting to
work with it.

When the information that Garmin put out said it could be powered
through the USB port, I would not have expected that it would require
a *special* cable to work, particularly if, as the OP stated, he had a
60CSx that worked with a standard cable.

I expect that it won't be long before third-party suppliers offer a
cable that will work with this unit, at a substantially lower price
than Garmin's. Still, I think it is a legitimate complaint that it
won't work with a setup that worked just fine with your 60CSx. That's
useful information that a lot of people would want to know.

This is the kind of thing Garmin does that irritates their customers.
Maybe there is some technical advantage to changing the way the units
are powered. I wouldn't know. But a lot of people will assume,
rightly or wrongly, that they did this just to make more money selling
accessories. They don't handle the public relations aspects of this
kind of thing well at all.


I acknowledge that I don't have a deep technical background in
computer technology, so what I'm about to say may well be wrong. It
seems to me that if the unit is putting out a signal through its USB
port that can be converted to serial and used, then it should be
possible for software with the right drivers to take the USB signal
directly and use it without going through the USB to serial and serial
to USB conversion. Of course there probably isn't any software that
has those drivers, yet; but it seems like this problem is on the
computer end, not the receiver end.

It would have been nice if the Colorado output the data in a similar
enough format to that of the older units that you could just plug it
in and have it work; but that doesn't seem to happen very often when
new hardware is introduced.


If I'm right in my speculation above, I don't think the complaints
you've mentioned so far rise to that level. Nothing so far would be a
deal-killer for me. Actually, those things wouldn't affect me at
all. I am grateful to you, though, for providing the information, and
hope that you will continue.


I wouldn't plan to hang it from by belt using the carabiner. I've
always used a pouch when I carry a GPSr on my belt, and expect to
continue to do that. The carabiner clip could be handy for securing
the unit in other places, though.