A lot of people ask me for freebies. Here you go: Go get your Garmin. Update the software right now. You’re at a computer – unless you’re reading this on your phone, in which case I’ll try to keep it short – so you don’t have any excuses. Even if you just bought your Garmin yesterday, had it for years or will be opening it a month from
now, our engineers may have been working on new software while it sat
on a shelf, in your house or under the tree. Updating your software through my.Garmin.com is free, it’s fast, it’s easy and it makes your Garmin even better than before without costing a dime. And with as much as our engineers are able to pack into a software update, it should really be called a product upgrade. 

Take, for example, this week’s news about Custom Maps. Simply by updating the software on your Garmin Oregon, Dakota or Colorado and following a few simple steps, you can now transform existing paper and digital maps into downloadable content to overlay onto your device. Visit garmin.com/CustomMaps to learn more about this process that maximizes the potential of your product. To get an idea of the other aspects that can be added or improved upon through software updates, check out the newest post at GPSFix.com. While it focuses on Custom Maps, the entry also rattles off the other new benefits of the latest software updates. And it’s not just outdoor handhelds that show how great products can be made even better. My fellow bloggers Carl and Peg have shown how recent software updates can improve the Approach G5 golf GPS or the Forerunner family of fitness watches. And many of these improvements are based on customer feedback, so whether you’re talking to clerks at a retail store, my colleagues at a trade show or me during a race (that’s how I passed a couple miles of the Chicago Marathon last month), your feedback is being heard. But enough from me, you’re supposed to be updating your software. You can thank me later.

More than ever, touchscreen navigation in the great outdoors is within your reach. Today, we announced Garmin’s new Dakota 10 and Dakota 20 outdoor handhelds. Physically smaller than the iconic Garmin eTrex, Dakota boasts a much bigger color display thanks to the 2.6-inch glove-friendly touchscreen.

Lightweight, rugged and waterproof, Garmin’s new Dakota devices quickly acquire and maintain satellite reception – even in heavy tree cover or deep canyons – thanks to 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. Everyone from geocachers and youth scouts to surveyors and hunters can take advantage of Dakota’s 850 MB of internal memory, which can store up to 1,000 waypoints, 50 routes, 2,000 geocaches and an active tracklog of up to 10,000 points and 200 saved tracks.

Dakota 20 adds even more features, including a 3-axis compass,
barometric altimeter, a microSD card slot for increased mapping and
memory storage, and wireless unit-to-unit connectivity for sharing your
waypoints, tracks, routes and geocaches wirelessly with compatible
Dakota, Oregon, Colorado and Foretrex devices. Dakota 20’s 3-axis,
tilt-compensated electronic compass shows your heading even when you’re
standing still, without needing to hold it level.

Based on the innovative interface of Garmin’s award-winning Oregon series, Dakota’s glove-friendly, color 2.6-inch touchscreen display is easy to read and use in all conditions, responsive to the touch of your finger, yet resistant to the forces of nature. Weighing only 6.75 ounces, Dakota lasts up to 20 hours on two AA batteries and can connect to your PC or Mac via USB connection.

It’s fun and easy to get into paperless geocaching with Dakota. You can download up to 2,000 caches, with information such as location, terrain, difficulty, hints and description — no more paper print outs and manually entered coordinates. Visit Garmin.com/geocache for more information.

Dakota comes preloaded with a worldwide basemap and is compatible with Garmin 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).