Up until now, I haven't liked touchscreen trail GPS, at least as implemented on the Garmin Oregon series of GPS receivers. I found the Oregon 450 to be slow, unresponsive, and awkward to use. It was impossible to use it with gloves, even thin liner gloves. The screen was hard to see in sunlight. I much preferred the buttons on my old Garmin 76Csx, and later, Garmin 62s.
I never tried the Garmin Montana series as they are just too heavy for backpacking use- and I'm more a backpacker than a day hiker. But even day hiking I like to keep my weight down. Of course, then I load up with with heavy photo gear.
Now, touchscreens have their place. They work well on street GPS receivers, e-book readers (I love the Kindle Paperwhite), tablets, and smartphones.
Enter the Garmin Oregon 600. Garmin claimed a greatly improved, multi-touch screen and a revised user interface. So I ordered one to try. And I'm very pleasantly surprised. The touchscreen is smooth and responsive, like my Android phone and tablet. You can do all the things you expect with a touchscreen, like pinch-zooming and two-fingered rotation. The user interface is logically laid out and very customizable.
As a writer of hiking guides, there are two things I do constantly on my trail GPS- marking waypoints, and recording tracks. On the Garmin 62s, two key presses, Mark and Enter, save a waypoint from any screen. On the old Oregon, saving a waypoint was slow and awkward. First you had to get to the main screen, then touch Mark Waypoint and then touch the save icon. As I said above, this didn't work with gloves.
On the Oregon 600, there are two programmable physical buttons- the power button and the user button. The power button can be set to perform two actions in addition to turning the power on and off, and the user button can perform three actions, depending on whether it is pressed, double-pressed, or long-pressed. By default, a single-press of the user button brings up the Mark Waypoint screen, no matter what screen is displayed. Then touch Save to save the waypoint. Since the Oregon 600's screen works well with liner gloves (though not with thick gloves), it's just as easy to save a waypoint on the 600 as it is on the 62s.
Track recording is where the Oregon 600 really shines. There's a Current Track page that lets you start and stop track recording, and clear and save the track. You can also view track statistics, view the track on the map, and view the track's elevation profile.
In addition, in Track Setup you can set the unit to start recording a track as soon as it acquires satellites, and to automatically pause when you stop moving. This last feature is really useful because it prevents the little random track points that appear around a point where you've stopped. (These are caused by the GPS receiver continuing to record position fixes up to 10 meters away from your actual location, a result of the accuracy limits of GPS.) In the past, I've had to carefully edit downloaded tracks on the computer to eliminate these extra bits of track. In my tests so far, with automatic track pause turned on, the Oregon 600 records a really clean track, compared to the 62s.
I think I'm going to like the Oregon 600- but only some field experience will tell.
I have the two physical buttons programmed as follows:
Power button long press: power on/off (not programmable)
Power button double-press: Main Menu
Power button single-press: Status screen
User button long-press: Current Track screen
User button single-press: Mark Waypoint screen
User button double-press: Start/Stop track recording
There are four models in the Oregon 600 series:
600: Includes all features above, plus tilt-compensated magnetic compass and barometric altimeter
600t: Adds preloaded 1:100,000 U.S. topo maps
650: Adds an 8 megapixel camera
650t: Adds both camera and topo maps
I don't recommend the "t" models because you can get much better 1:24,000 topo maps free from gpsfiledepot.com.
Buy the Garmin Oregon 600 series on Amazon here.
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