Ever since we unveiled our next-generation outdoor handhelds, Garmin bloggers (and our secret
geocaching stashers) have been placing limited-edition Oregon
and Colorado geocoins in caches across the U.S. and around the world. A message inserted with every stashed coin asks the discoverer to share the story behind the search. And after more than two years in hiding, many of these treasures are still out there just waiting to be
found!! And with Garmin’s touchscreen Oregon and Dakota
units, that hunt is even easier thanks to paperless caching. So enjoy this story from Kent E. about his successful search, check out our learning center video about geocaching with an Oregon handheld and then click on the respective links for
interactive demos (Oregon and Dakota) and feature-specific tutorials (Oregon and Dakota).

I woke up this morning intent on finding/logging a few geocaches in my area. I made a quick pit-stop at a rest area along I-5 S. There I found a cache with an assortment of trackables. I’m sure they were placed here as a quick pick up for anyone leaving to go out of town. I couldn’t resist the Silver Garmin geocoin. I had to retrieve it and put it somewhere special. After owning my first GPS since Christmas ‘09, I have become a geocache addict. My Garmin has never let me down, and feels like it is indestructible. With the help from my friends/family, 2010 is the year I quit smoking cigarettes. Most of the credit goes to my eTrex. How could I possibly smoke a cigarette in some of the beautiful places this GPS has taken me. Garmin changed my life. CITO! Hike the Cascades!!

If your goals for the new year include spending more time exploring and enjoying the outdoors, Garmin has new ways to enhance your adventures. Today we announced the Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 touchscreen GPS devices, the newest of Garmin’s next-generation outdoor handhelds now compatible with the online community at Garmin Connect as well as Garmin’s free Custom Maps utility for transferring paper or digital maps onto your compatible handheld.

“More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them,” said Dan Bartel, Garmin’s vice president of worldwide sales. “Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 provide a bridge between the slimmed-down Dakota family and the top-of-line Oregon 550t, all of which work seamlessly with Garmin Custom Maps in planning your adventure and Garmin Connect for reliving the experience and sharing the memories.”

Responsive to the touch of a finger, yet resistant to the rigors of nature, Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 simplify navigation through a glove-friendly touchscreen interface. This bright 3” color display is easier than ever to read and use in all conditions. Other key upgrades include user-selectable dashboards, enhanced track navigation, high-speed USB for faster map transfers with your computer, photo navigation and the 3-axis tilt-compensated electronic compass, which shows your heading even when you’re standing still, without the need to hold it level. The new dashboards give users the ability to customize the appearance of various pages on your Oregon, including the geocaching, compass, stopwatch and elevation functions. For hikers, cyclists and trail runners, the enhanced track navigation will prove especially useful. When navigating to a destination on an active track, users will see the changes in elevation ahead of them as well as where they’ve been. Also, waypoints and other key locations along the active route – such as start, end and high and low elevation points – now appear on the map and active route pages. The new Oregon units also include a barometric altimeter, paperless geocaching and wireless exchange of tracks, waypoints, routes and geocaches with compatible Oregon, Dakota, Colorado and Foretrex devices.

Both units boast a worldwide shaded relief basemap, and Oregon 450t adds preloaded 100K topographic maps for the entire United States and state-of-the-art 3D elevation perspective. Coverage on the 450t includes major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas. In addition, you can search for points of interest by name or proximity to your location and view descriptive details for terrain contours, topo elevations, summits and geographical points.

Customizing maps for your Garmin outdoor handheld – and downloading your activity afterward – were never easier. Through a few simple steps, Garmin’s Custom Maps can bring the details, labels and landmarks of your existing paper or electronic map to a compatible Garmin Oregon, Dakota or Colorado. Compatible with both PC and Mac, this free utility complements the myriad of mapping products already offered for Garmin devices, including City Navigator®, NT for turn-by-turn directions on city streets, Blue Chart® g2, for marine charting, and TOPO U.S. 24K and 100K map software for incredible terrain detail (each sold separately). The power of Custom Maps is exemplified through paper and digital maps labeled for specific events and purposes, such as a college graduation invitation that lists campus buildings; a roadmap of a parade, marathon, 5K or bike race; a park pamphlet showing trailheads; land-management maps of wildlife and game areas; or a historic illustration of an area as it once stood. To walk through the steps, to find and share maps and to join discussions about Garmin Custom Maps, visit www.garmin.com/CustomMaps.

Experiences will live on long after the activity has ended, thanks to Garmin Connect’s newly announced compatibility with Garmin outdoor handhelds, adding an expansive new product line to the free-to-join online community of more than 17 million activities – with more than 38,000 new activities per day – for sharing, storing, analyzing and enjoying. Outdoor and fitness enthusiasts alike can share activities on Facebook and Twitter, export to Google Earth or relive the activity in table view, calendar view or on a variety of maps including our new embedded Google Earth view.

This December 2009 update also allows you to: easily upload to and from next-generation Garmin devices; manually upload .gpx files; send any track found at Garmin Connect in Explore to your Garmin Outdoor device for navigation; and export activity files in .gpx and .tcx format to use on third-party applications. Learn more and join Garmin Connect at http://connect.garmin.com.

Weighing only 6.8 ounces, the Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 last up to 16 hours on two AA batteries. Each device has a high-sensitivity GPS receiver with HotFixTM, which automatically calculates and stores critical satellite information and can use that information to quickly calculate a position. The new Oregon models have 850 MB of internal memory and a microSD™ card slot for photos and optional map data, and you can store up to 2,000 waypoints, 200 routes, 5,000 caches and a tracklog of up to 10,000 points and 200 saved tracks. Geocachers can help the environment and be more efficient by going paperless with Oregon by quickly downloading cache information directly to the device. Oregon stores and displays key information such as location, terrain, difficulty, hints and description, so that you don’t have to tote printouts with you. Learn more about geocaching, getting started and going paperless at www.garmin.com/geocaching.

Welcome to another Wish List Wednesday — when we help you find the perfect Garmin gift for that special someone. Previous WLW posts have covered gift ideas for pilots, boaters, fitness fanatics and savvy travelers, and today’s focus is on getting the most out of the great outdoors.

Our rugged line of intuitive touchscreen devices includes the budget-friendly Dakota series and powerfully versatile Oregon family.Leading the way are the Oregon 550 and Oregon 550t, which feature a built-in 3.2 megapixel digital camera that automatically geotags the location of each photo so that you can relive the memory and easily return to the spot you photographed.

Sharing your activities has never been easier, thanks to this month’s updates at Garmin Connect. This online community with 17 million activities for storing, sharing and exploring will be growing faster than ever now that it supports outdoor handhelds. Another free utility, Custom Maps, makes it easy to put paper and digital maps onto your compatible Garmin handheld. Also, geocaching is a free family activity, and Oregon and Dakota make it easy to go paperless for more fun with no printouts. Finally, we have interactive demos and online tutorials for free lessons on tapping into the various features. With these bonus freebies, a Garmin device is a gift that keeps on giving!

Today brought great news to hikers, campers, hunters, geocachers and anyone else who loves outdoor activities. Garmin Connect is proud to welcome the Garmin outdoor product line to the site. With today’s updates, Garmin Connect now supports uploads from Garmin outdoor devices, including Garmin mass storage devices such as zūmo and nüvi. This is exciting news, as it means we offer support for all of Garmin’s fitness and outdoor devices. Now more than ever, Garmin Connect is your easy to use, go-to site for all of your activity logging and training needs.

For those of you with a Garmin outdoor handheld device you can expect many new features, and improvements on your favorite features:

Easy uploads for new generation Garmin devices

Manual uploads for .gpx files

Activity log in table view

Activity log in the new Calendar view

Detailed analysis of activities

Relive activities in the improved Player

View activities on maps including our new embedded Google Earth view

Export to Google Earth

Share activities on Facebook and Twitter

Export activity files in .gpx and .tcx format to use on third-party applications

Explore other routes from Garmin customers – 15 million plus activities and counting

Over 38,000 new activities uploaded everyday

Send any track found at Garmin Connect in Explore to your Garmin Outdoor device for navigation

We are confident that Garmin outdoor customers will enjoy Garmin Connect, and that the site will continue to meet your fitness and adventure needs.

Whether you’re shopping for a gift or getting acquainted with your new purchase, we want you to know as much as possible about the Garmin you’re checking out. That’s why we’re always adding more quick feature-specific tutorials to our online learning center. These helpful step-by-step videos bring to life the features and functions of Garmin’s products, to help you out before you hit the stores or after you’ve hit the power button. Our newest videos focus on the Dakota series of touchscreen handhelds, which are perfect for hiking, camping and geocaching with your family and friends. From acquiring GPS signals to navigating to your destination, Jake walks you through the process with vivid screenshots and scenic examples. And keep checking the learning center, because Oregon tutorials are right around the corner. 

But our learning center isn’t just for fans of flannel and fleece. Runners, cyclists and gym-goers can learn about the FR60 fitness watch, Forerunner 405’s GPS-based features or the various cycling options for Edge 705. Golfers can focus on improving their game with the touchscreen Approach G5 and its more than 10,000 preloaded courses. Pilots can reach new heights with information about flyGarmin, Pilot My-Cast and GPSMAP 696. Boaters and fishermen can find new depths with Garmin’s Marine Network. And businesspeople and travelers alike will appreciate the navigation options at their fingertips with nüvifone G60. But no matter your hobbies, we wish you all a safe and happy holiday season.

Energy, enthusiasm, intelligence and curiosity. That’s what local Boy Scouts brought to a Kansas City park the past couple weekends, and all I had to supply were some basic Garmin handhelds and a little know-how. OK, my know-how wasn’t even needed, because as soon as these youngsters got their hands on a GPS device, they were off and running. We recently supplied local troops with a few dozen lean and green Geko units – our tiny-yet-tough outdoor handhelds – as the Boy Scouts consider adding Geocaching as a merit category. If the past two weeks are any indication, they’ll be earning their badges in record time. Here are a few pictures taken Sunday, when the local NBC affiliate joined us as the Scouts learned about the Geko, the new touchscreen Dakota and the Oregon 550t with built-in camera – all while discovering limited-edition Garmin geocoins. As I mentioned on the air, I’m all for any activity that gets kids (and adults, for that matter) more engaged with the environment, education, recreation and technology. And the timing was perfect, as it gave me yet another reason to give thanks this holiday season that all of those elements add up to a good day at the office (or the park…).