Bumping this old thread since I just noticed it was linked to in this article.
Garmin, Revive Oregon and Take My Money
medium.com
Their plea is sincere, but I suspect it will fall on deaf ears. IMO, Garmin has decided their touchscreen devices just can't compete with smartphones but their pushbutton devices are still popular for people who don't like phones. Looks like they may have lost their best customer with this guy....
"I’ve gone through 5 or 6 Oregons over the years, moving up the series numbers. Some fell on hard surfaces, some got smashed in crashes. Dropped one on rock tiles in Italy. One got destroyed in a motorcycle crash in Estonia. One fell out of a motorcycle holder and I never found it despite walking along the highway for hours. A few in motorcycle crashes in Latvia. The last one, Oregon 750, fell out of a bicycle holder, then a car ran over it."
I'm sure Garmin will do just fine with their expensive aviation and nautical devices, not to mention their smartwatches, bike computers and fitness devices. Want a Garmin touchscreen? No problem, you can get the brick-sized Montana 7xx starting at $650 or $900 "fully loaded". The GPSMap 67 is probably comparable to what an Oregon might cost today, it starts at $500 and goes up to $600. These devices start to look like boutique products to me, I certainly won't spend that much for a GPS (although I could buy one of each
every year and come out
way ahead of what I spend to lease the boydsmaps server, LOL).
Anyway, I wish him well, there are certainly a bunch of other people who miss the Oregon. But I think Garmin has decided they just can't sell enough to make it worthwhile. At least they're including more maps with these devices now, my Oregon 400 and Montana 600 only had their terrible 100k US Topo and you had to buy everything else separately. Now, it looks like you get their topoactive maps (openstreetmap?) plus City Navigator and Birdseye imagery. Don't know about their new devices, but Birdseye performance on my Montana 600 was just awful, really slow to zoom the map and the low contrast resistive touchscreen made everything look like mud. The final insult was when they completely discontinued Birdseye for these older devices.
As the last lonely moderator at
GPSFileDepot, I can tell you that 99% (maybe more) of the posts in their forum are just spam that I delete every day. Most of it is in Russian with links to cracked software, crypto scams and some really outrageous porn. It's just depressing, there used to be a lively discussion of maps and map-making. I guess people still download the free Garmin maps there, but aside from a couple people working with openstreetmap, it's really old stuff that was great in 2008 but looks pretty sad today.
And since this thread has been linked to on Medium, of course I'll post a gratuitous link to
boydsmaps.com where you can compare my philosophy to Garmin's. I think a GPS should include a big selection of high-performance maps and, of course... it's free!
www.garmin.com
If anyone else wants this map, this is the last call. It will be removed later today or tomorrow as part of the transition of the site away from Wordpress. And that will be the end of my maps for Garmin devices (at least for now).
