31 out of 31 people found this review helpful.
A Great GPS for an Affordable Price!
Date of Review: Mar 31, 2003
The Bottom Line: A great GPS that meets your basic needs. Despite the hard to use interface and sometimes cluttered maps, it is a good buy.
I bought the Garmin Etrex Legend a week ago from Amazon.com for $150 (after a $50 rebate). I have been very satisfied with this GPS ever since I first used it. Being an amateur, have never used a GPS before. But the Etrex Legend proved easy to use and I learned to use most of its functions quickly and without too much difficulty.
The Etrex Legend comes with 8 MB of memory, which can be used to download more detailed maps and save tracks as well as other information that you store while using your GPS. The GPS already comes with basic maps that include major roads and highways, but it does not include smaller streets and places of interest. To solve this, you can upload additional maps onto your GPS, but this requires additional software purchases that do not come with the original GPS package.
I bought the Garmin MapSource CD for $99 which includes the road maps for the United States. I would recommend this CD if you are planning to use this GPS in the car to find directions. The maps included in the MapSource CD are also great for road trips because it displays places of interest such as restaurants, hotels, and attractions. Other software CDs you can purchase for the Etrex include Roads and Recreation and World Map.
The 8MB of memory was just enough to download detailed maps for parts of the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. To give you an idea of how many maps you can download, if you are familiar with the San Francisco area, the 8MB of memory was able to contain detailed maps for San Francisco, northern Alameda county, San Mateo County, and Western Santa Clara County. And for those familiar with the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, 8MB is enough to download detailed maps of Downtown LA, San Gabriel Valley, and parts of West LA only. So, 8MB is not quite that much memory to download a lot of maps, but it should do if you are taking a road trip to a certain city and want specific detailed maps for that particular area. Uploading the maps onto the GPS from the MapSource CD is fairly easy to do (usually takes less than 20 minutes for the data to be transferred from computer to GPS).
The GPS also comes with plenty of neat functions. It can be used as an odometer to measure your speed and also comes with functions that measure distance, maximum speed, average speed, moving time, stopping times, etc. You can even see if your car s odometer is accurate by comparing the GPS odometer with your car s odometer. The GPS can also track the paths you take and you can even upload your tracks onto your computer if you have MapSource or other Garmin map software.
Other neat features of the Etrex Legend include an atomic clock that automatically adjusts your time to the standard US atomic time, a hunting and fishing feature that tells you the best times to hunt and fish specifically at your location, and also a sun and moon chart that tells you the sunrise/sunset/moonrise/moonset times for your location. This sun and moon feature also has a very neat animation that tells you where the sun and moon are located in the sky for the specific time and location on the earth at which you use the GPS.
The case of the GPS is extremely sturdy and rugged. It is waterproof (can even be submerged in water for quite a while until water enters the inside after about 15 minutes) The design looks attractive in its shiny blue translucent case. I like the rubber bottom of the GPS. This rubber bottom makes it perfect to place on your car dashboard so that it does not slide around while driving.
I have used this GPS on a road trip back home to Los Angeles and also during a trip to Yosemite National Park. It tracks your location very accurately and it was extremely fun seeing where you are on the map using your GPS and watching your location change as you move along the road. It allows you to see what intersections you are about to approach and also tells you what restaurants are near when you want to grab a bite to eat. It was also fun using it while hiking at Yosemite because it tracked your exact path, the distance you traveled, elevation, and other neat tidbits about the hikes I took there.
A con for the GPS involves a hard-to-use interface. The buttons are a little hard to press sometimes and it is made to be used for the left-hand (which makes it difficult to use with the right-hand). The little joystick button is sometimes hard to maneuver. Also, maps can sometimes take a while to load up on the GPS when they are very detailed. And the detail on the maps can easily clutter up your screen and can be hard to read.
All in all, this GPS is a worthwhile purchase for all its features and functionality. It might be a little pricy for those of you who don t wish to spend a lot of money for something not too useful for daily life. It s not really a necessity for the average person who doesn t really need a GPS to find directions on the road, since you can use a Thomas Guide and Internet maps as substitutes. But if you hike a lot, easily get lost or have difficulty looking up directions on maps, this might be a good purchase. The GPS is not really a necessity in life, but it is something fun to have and to show off to your friends.
