It’s a good day to be the owner of a Garmin Oregon and / or Motorola Droid…

Garmin Oregon beta

Garmin has rolled out new beta firmware with some great added features. These include:

• Customized dashboards can now be added to the map and computer screens. Dashboard options include Compass, Stopwatch, Active Geocache, and Elevation Plot.
• You can now view the elevation plot of an upcoming active route or currently navigated track in blue (shown at right).
• Some great new track navigation options, which are detailed at the Garmin Trail Tech blog. I completely agree with their statement that “for many customers, navigating a saved track is the best option for providing guidance along a desired trail.” I encourage you to go and read their post in detail. The new features include automatically adding high and low elevation points for a track, and adding any waypoints along it to the active route. I suspect that mileage calculations will now be based on the track and not “as the crow flies” distances, though I’ve yet to verify this. There are also some tips posted at the Garmin Oregon wiki. UPDATE: I recently put together a post with some tips on using this new track navigation feature.

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