Garmin eTrex 30 Outdoor Handheld GPS Unit

The 2 star review is so wrong - the reviewer obviously did not check out first what he was actually buying.

The ETrex 30 is a very sophisticated piece of kit - incredibly quick to locate your position and very accurate (it can tell if you are on one side of a road or the other and the triangle icon on the screen not only shows your location but also the direction you are facing). The features and menu options are also very intuitive and the buttons and "toggle / joy-stick" are very easy to operate - you can do eveything with your thumb, even when wearing mits.
The features such as the "trip meter" are brilliant (even tells you how long to sunset) and loading routes from your computer is a doddle. It has a three dimensional compass that very few GPS have - which means it works even when you are standing still. The altimeter is also very accurate. Phone apps are no-way comparable to what this piece of kit can do.

Two AA batteries do last the 25 hours advertised - Iam getting three days walking out of them.

I bought it so that I could download 1:2500 maps of specific areas as I need them. Two problems with this: 1) It works out very expensive (e,g. Lake District = £100) and 2) as the 2* reviewer says the "base map" on "BirdsEye" is so poor that you can not accurately identify the area that you you are purchasing - which means that you can make expensive mistakes. This is a pity as the "purchase only what you need" feature is supposed to be a big selling point - I have been told that my email complaining about this has been passed on to the boffins at Garmin.

Given the above, and the small screen size, I would advise purchasing the SD card of the 1:50,000 OS Map for the whole of the UK - this will add another £200 to the purchase price so you need to take this in to account when comparing with other products.

The ETrex 30 is a sophisticated but easy piece of kit to use, it is nice and compact and durable for walking and running. However, if you need a larger screen (e.g. for the handlebars of a bike)I would go for the less sophisticated, older technowlogy, but larger screened SatMap Active 10.

This is highly accurate and ideal for Geocaching.Garmin trail maps unfortunately are very expensive, does anyone have suggestions on alternative Trail Maps options for these hand held devices ?

This is the first GPS handheld device I've bought and my expectations were high given these days you can get free google maps on your smartphone and can do a lot with that without even buying a dedicated GPS device.

The device comes with a base map which is very low detail. More significantly, it does not accurately display the precise location of the roads, rivers and railway lines etc that it holds. I went walking with the device and at one point it showed me walking across the A26 when that road was actually about a quarter of a mile from me. I've found from numerous usages that the device routinely does not place your current location accurately over the base map. I contacted Garmin support about this and they explained that this is normal and not a fault. The base map without the overlay of an additional purchase detailed map is not meant to be any thing more than indicative. I've got a Tom Tom One car GPS which I bought in 2007 which has no problems putting me bang in the centre of any road I drive along with no need to buy an extra map. With the Garmin, the base map is pointless without buying an additional map.

So let's assume you decide to buy a more detailed map. Unlike buying books for your Kindle or tunes for your iPod, the maps you buy only belong to the device you buy them for. So if you decide to fork out £200 for OS maps of the UK then you've got to do that again when you buy your next device. This is just a complete rip-off and does not fit the 'apps store' model that is prevalent today for the purchase of electronic media for electronic devices.

The above 2 points are I believe true of all Garmin devices, so those disappointments are not peculiar to the eTrex30, but as I say I've discovered this on my first Garmin GPS handheld purchase.

I've found that aside from the base maps not displaying accurately over your location, your location itself is nevertheless very accurate. I've loaded GPX routes of walks I've wanted to follow and the positioning of the device relative to the routes has been spot on. Equally, routes I've recorded have proved to be very accurate when loaded into Google Earth to review.

The user interface is straightforward in terms of selecting features, although the way some features work is not particularly intuitive, or once you've understood them are disappointing that they've been implemented in that way. For example the trip computer simply runs constantly whilst the device is on (to record mileage etc). You can't hit a start button for it. So if you want to time your walk the only option is to reset the trip computer at the point you want it to start timing. Equally once you've finised you can't actually 'stop the clock', so you can't review your statistics later, only there and then whilst it is ticking away. Why not just implement a simple stop watch style 'start/stop'?

Similarly recording a route just runs constantly. When the device is on it's tracking your movement and when it's off it of course isn't, but that's the only control you have over it. Again I was expecting something along the lines of a 'start recording route now' option (coupled to the starting of the trip computer would have also been useful). Instead it just records constantly and you get the chance to save off the recording when you elect to do so, or delete it and allow constant recording to resume from then. The device would be far more useful for recording routes, timing etc if you could just treat it like any other sort of recording device with a start / stop / pause control. Why has this simple intuitive control model been omitted?

Another complaint is that the version of the software on the device shipped came with several bugs, not least a well documented (on the internet) freezing problem. That's now fixed in the latest software which you can download and install, but other bugs remain such as (on Win7, 64 bit) ejecting the device from your PC causes an error message. Support denied all knowledge of this problem and told me to hard reset the device, but there are other reports on the internet of this bug.

There's more both good and bad I could decribe but the above is a good flavour. All in all disappointing. You need to be something of a dedicated 'hobbyist' type to get on with this device. I wouldn't describe it as 'production ready' for mainstream use, but that's probably true of many GPS handhelds. These sorts of devices will soon fall behind in the market given smartphones can give you dynamic, internet available information overlayed over a map and for free. This device despite being new to the market felt like it was behind the times in its lack of that dynamic info (ok it's not a smartphone with internet access but therein lies the problem for the future of GPS handhelds when competign with Smartphones), poor map purchase model, software with bugs etc.