Name: Goldmember
Location:
Date: 2007-02-16
Customer Rating: -
Summary: The only all in one in my opinion
Comment: No matter what you are into this unit delivers. I use it for hunting, fishing and auto navigation. With its electronic compass it works extremely well in the woods, even in heavy cover. Load the lakemaster data card into it and get extremely well detailed maps of your fishing spots. Put the city navigator maps in it and get turn by turn directions with auto routing and re-routing on missed turns. Geocache friendly. There simply is not a handheld on the market with all these capabilities. Did I mention the unit locks on to satellites in extremely dense cover? I can turn this on in my house in my basement sitting 6 feet away from the window and it locks on. Truly well worth the investment. I have had mine a year now with no troubles. I have tried the others and they do not hold a candle to this unit.
Name: Cybamuse
Location: Fuzzy Europe
Date: 2007-04-06
Customer Rating: -
Summary: So easy to use!
Comment: Goodness GPS systems have come a long way in the last 2-3 years! Compared to my old Garmin e-trex, vintage 2004, the GPS 60CSx is a significant and very positive improvement!
Firstly, the screen is really quite good. I have had very few, well, no problems seeing under a nice sunny sky. No more shading with the hands and angling it until just the right amount of shadow crosses it! So that is one big bonus! The colour is good as well - it is an improvement on black and white (grey?), no doubt about it...
Another thing is its improved ability to pick up satellites. They promise it in the blurb, and its true. How they do it, I don't know. True, when you first turn the GPS on, it still takes about a minute to find the satellites, and it really helps if the GPS unit is exposed to fairly open sky, but once it has hooked up with its satellite, it somehow retains fairly accurate coverage even when I have walked 6ft into my room (although some satellites will drop out). However, brightly, it does pick up the satellites very quickly once you get close to a window or out under open skies. Should make it more interesting for those who like tracking themselves while on a plane... I do recall older gps systems were quite useless even sitting on your lap on a plane, but now...
This GPS system is also very intuitive to use - something I have NEVER said a out any other GPS system I've used in the last 3 years... It does come with instructions, but they only cover the intuitive bits about using the GPS - tracking, waypoints, setting up the compass etc. And to be honest, I had it all nailed in about 10 minutes standing outside- without reading the instructions. What a change from one of their high end GPS systems of 2 years ago where I had to pause tracking to insert a waypoint! Much easier now!
Instructions fell down rather badly when it came to hooking up your device to your computer and doing advanced tricks in that arena. I was not assisted by buying a Windows Vista computer at about the same time and the Garmin Waypoint manager that came with the GPS system wasn't compatible. Thank goodness some real diehard Garmin GPS geeks were discussing this issue furiously on the web and within days, Garmin had released a patch on its website - which vexingly, it advertised as fixing some error to do with reading US topo maps and not mentioning it actually meant you could synchronise your GPS with your Windows Vista-enabled computer...
I also liked the ability to add more text to the decription - 8 characters was never enough and now I can add more. And (bonus) can add an enhanced description below my label (maybe that was around before, but if so, it was difficult to use as I wasn't aware of this feature).
I use long life batteries (beginning with "D") in them and must admit in 6 weeks of fairly intensive use, I only changed the batteries once. But I would suspect if you kept it on all day AND tracking your course, then the batteries would run down in 1.5 days (tracking really drains the batteries). But if not tracking and just marking waypoints, it seems to last 3-4 days of being on all day. Not bad! One day I'll pop my rechargeable batteries in and see if they last a day of intensive use...
In fact my only 'gripes' with it are it still seems to take 1-3 minutes to find all the satellites, I wish they'd come up with a better way to input text (joystick mouse and press mouse to click on letter???) and the compass really sucks. Even after 'calibrating' my compass twice (to the device' satsifaction) it was out by about 13 degrees (I happen to need a accuracy so carried my old fashioned expensive 'manual' compass). That is a bit disappointing as I would like to dispense with the manual compass if possible, but I don't trust the Garmin compas at this point!
Name: D Rios
Location: Southern Arizona
Date: 2007-04-11
Customer Rating: -
Summary: 60CSx on/off road
Comment: I use this GPS device for off and on road use. I jeep in very remote areas. The 60CSx is very accurate and aquires satellites quickly. Reception is great in mountain terrain. Tracking and routing are very accurate and handy when hiking. Its great to have it in my Jeep from home, on the trail, and then click to my belt and take a hike. Very nice. Plenty of memory for storing trips, runs, and hikes. I bought the City Navigator North America software with the unit. Awesome for planning trips. My wife loves this thing when traveling, I can't get it out of her hands. A simple sinc between software and GPS unit and I'm good to go. Finding locations/places/addresses is a little cumbersome using the GPS device, but what do you expect from a compact hand held unit? Its nice to be able to look up this information on the fly when traveling like gas stations, hotels, banks etc.. MAKE SURE TO UPGRADE THE MEMORY TO 1GIG. My handheld now has all my North America Maps, possibly excluding New York City and LA because of their massive memory usage, and you can always add these if you need them. I sure don't. The Altimeter, Barometer for weather, and Electronic Compass are a huge step up from my old basic Garmin non-mapping unit. Easy to learn. I love this unit. 5 stars on this one..
Name: Michael Hardtmann
Location:
Date: 2007-05-28
Customer Rating: -
Summary: GPS 60 CSx - the all-rounder grows up
Comment: Key features:
Portability
Ruggedness
Universal application
More memory!
Battery life!
Drawbacks: (I'm being nitpicky, here)
Belt clip is delicate
Transfer of maps takes a long time
Cost of MapSource PC software (no Mac edition available!)
... no screen protector foils available
I have had a 60CS for three years, and appreciated the flexibility and many-sidedness of the device. My primary concern had always been the limited memory, and the need to always load new maps whenever I traveled further than a few hundred kilometers. The CSx has solved that, with its micro-SD card (I immediately installed a 2GB module, enough for all of Europe! The transfer, using MapSource, took about five hours, though...).
I also have the feeling that the CSx ups the CS in terms of reception and sensitivity. The graphic interface (particularly the menus) have changed, and not necessarily for the better, in my humble opinion. Nonetheless, I don't spend much time looking at them, so it's not critical.
The device is ideal for people on the go with different means of transportation - the 60 CSx can be comfortably carried in the hand or on a belt (the clip is kindof chintzy, though, and I've had to repair mine a few times - an after-market case is recommended), mounted on a bicycle, motorcycle or in a car. With geo-survey or terrain maps (which I haven't used yet), the device is great for hikers, too. It truly is waterproof, and rugged (I dropped my CS a couple of times, with no damage beyond a scuff mark!)
The CSx tops the CS not only in reception and memory, but in battery life as well. I opted for Eveready Lithium cells ($10/4 pack - but worth it!), and have used the device for ... something like 36 or 40 hours (with the electronic compass on!) and the indicator is still showing 4 bars out of four!)
The MapSource software (which you'll need if you want any more than the biggest roads and cities, which are available on the pre-installed region map) is good and easy to use. My biggest gripe - it's awfully expensive. That being said, you can use the one software with various maps and several devices at once, improving the price/performance ratio. Oh, and the fact that the MapSource (or any other mapping software for that matter!) isn't available for Macintosh... :^(
The CSx doesn't compare 1-to-1 with a typical navigation system like TomTom, or Garmin's own Nüvi, but it performs perfectly good street routing, corrects the course automatically (although sometimes it's not so good at choosing the BEST route all the time, but the routes it chooses are perfectly good, and the difference to the BEST one is often just a matter of minutes), and gives relatively good directions. At complex intersections, you sometimes need to go slowly, but I think this is the case with most navigation systems. The CSx does have significant advantages over a Nüvi or a TomTom, though, and they are particularly its portability, robustness and flexibility (you can set your routing for pedestrian, bicycle, car/motorcycle, or truck, for example).
I love it.
Name: nmfirefighter
Location: ABQ, NM
Date: 2008-05-27
Customer Rating: -
Summary: Best GPS in the entire world!!! And space too!
Comment: OK, OK, I'm not going to talk about all the incredible features with this GPS. The last 300 or so reviews did that plenty. I am only going to talk about the last week and what I went through trying to find the "Pefect" GPS for me. I have been using a Magelleon Meridium Platnium for 6 years. It has been a wonderful GPS, but it is time to upgrade and get up to date features. Perhaps I can save someone some time and frustration. Over the past six days, I have bought and returned 4 seperate GPS units, a Magelleon 2000 Triton, a Garmin Colorado, a Bushnell Onix 400 and a Delorme PN20. The Magelleon locked-up for good after two minutes, done, kapoot. The Delorme had cool maps and aerial imagry, but the "area calculation" feature that they advertise, (and that I need for work) is not usable on the unit, in the field. It does me no good to require a laptop computer and tons of software to do something a handheld GPS should be able to do alone. Also, the buttons felt a bit cheap on the Delorme. The Garmin Colorado 400T looked and felt cool, and the wheel was a novel idea, but several things cause a return as well. First, the screen was dark, so much so that even on full brightness, I kept trying to turn it up even more. Second, the data entry was a PAIN. The wheel is used for all character entry, it is very time consuming. Next..after doing the area calculation, it initially gave an "acre" reading, but as soon as you log it and put it in memory, it diverts ONLY to square feet after you recal it. Although I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, I still can't convert 176,000 square feet to acres in my head! Why they did this is beyond me. A third and "Nail in the coffin" for the 400T was the fact that I could NEVER get the Garmin site to recognize the GPS while registering. This step is required to download Geocaches. I hit a wall and couldn't get over it. The Bushnell 400 box was cool and intriging, and the discounted price was unbelievable, (I know why now). The price tag said 499, on sale for 199! WOW, well, heck, I'll give it a try. Worthless piece of junk. No maps, and impossible to download. The website was 100% unservicable. I couldn't even get the curser to move on it. NOTHING worked right on this hunk a junk. After coming back to REI again, (thank goodness for the return policy) an astute (and cute) female worker advised me about the Garmin Mapgps 60csx. I had never looked at this model before. Not really sure why, but it had never really caugh my eye. It was marked $399, but to my suprise, today only (Memorial Day sale) it was $299. NICE! (Thanks REI!) So I picked up the unit and the US TOPO DVD ($100). Without going into massive detail, all I will say is that the computer interface and Topo map loading went very well. Very easy to load maps. I bought a 512 MB micro SD card and I can put over a quarter of the US Topos on this card. I love this GPS, it doeas everything I need it to do and even more!!!!!! BEST GPS AROUND!!!
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