The Garmin Oregon 300 – GPS for the adventurer

If outdoors is your thing, and Bear Grylls is your role model, Garmin have come up with some high tech to ensure you don’t get lost in your pursuit of the untamed. Garmin have released their midrange Oregon 300 GPS, and it attempts to be the rugged jack of all navigation trades. STEVEN AMBROSE takes the Oregon through the wilds to see if it delivers.
A GPS device is becoming more and more an essential part of the modern day toolkit. No more the old paper maps and asking for directions. Handheld GPS devices now abound, with prices that make them almost a no-brainer – and they are even included in phones. The downside of many of these is that a quick swim in a river or a fall off your local mountain may not be good for their health. In response to this issue, Garmin came up with the compact and rugged Oregon 300. Garmin are almost the generic in GPS devices in South Africa, and the Oregon underlines their positioning.


The Oregon 300 is compact, smoothly rounded but fairly chunky in design, and is ruggedized with a sealed USB port and locking back flap, in order to protect it from the elements. The exterior is clean and pleasantly rubberised, with a single button to turn the device on and off. A micro SD card slot located underneath the batteries is not the most accessible, but it is unlikely you will be changing cards regularly.

The Oregon sits nicely in the hand, and the rubberised coating assists to give added grip.


The device is a bit of a jack of all trades, with pre-installed applications for a wide variety of functions, ranging from leisure pursuits, such as geo caching and fishing, to standard GPS direction-finding and navigation, to functions for fitness training and hiking. The software uses a simple and fairly intuitive (read: easy to get used to) profiles system to help you access the applications you need. For example, switch to the geocaching profile, and all the associated geocaching tools are moved to the first menu screen. There are five available profiles you can set up, and you can create more if needed.

The simplicity of the interface makes the Oregon a joy to use. It has a few unexpected extras, like viewing pictures stored on the SD card and a nifty ability to share tracks, trails, and waypoints wirelessly with other Garmin users. The overall lack of buttons and the touch screen make the Oregon easy to use, even if the protective coating on the screen forces you to push fairly hard to get the screen to respond. The built-in worldwide basemap with shaded contours is useful and powerful for those intrepid adventurers. This feature is touch enabled and shows the surrounding terrain.
I did find small issues with the Garmin, the first one related to satellite sensitivity and acquisition. It took a while from a cold start to acquire (i.e. pick up the signals from) the required satellites. And the devices lost the satellites when in heavy undergrowth. It recovered fast, but this could be a concern. The handy and very useful electronic compass also proved a little difficult to use as I had to hold it level to make it work.

My biggest issue is the screen. It is simply not bright enough. As the device is designed to work outdoors, the screen should be viewable in bright sunlight and it is not. You can shade it to see better, but this could be a problem if you are running or on your bike. Garmin needs to come up with a software update to fix the issue.

Speaking of which, I downloaded the updater from the Garmin website, and after a painless install, an update for the Oregon 300 was available. The update installed smoothly and a number of small issues were fixed, for example the sensitivity of satellite acquisition and retention appeared to be solved, along with a number of other issues. It is highly recommended that you download the updater application and check regularly for updates.

Pricing

The current street price of the Oregon 300 ranges from R4170 to R7110, which is expensive for a GPS device. The high price is somewhat mitigated by the additional functionality over standard GPS devices, and the ruggedness of the unit itself. That said, it is not great value for money at these prices, as the feature set does not offset the high price entirely. There are few alternatives with this combination of features and ruggedness in the South African market, so the Garmin gets a conditional recommendation. It would make sense to shop around for the best price though.

In summary

Overall, the Garmin Oregon 300 is a wonderful device for the adventure-minded. It has all the features you may need for your expeditions to faraway places. It takes regular batteries, or rechargeable. A carabineer back cover is included, so clipping it to your gear is easy. It is rugged and effective and easy to use. Garmin must have spent some time really understanding where a device such as this would go, and have made sure that most bases are covered, with useful applications and functions. Simply never get lost again, no matter where you go.
For more information go to http://www.garmin.co.za

Nokia N97 Promises much but does it deliver?

On the face of it, all the tech boxes are ticked: 3.5” touchscreen, all the HSPAs, WiFi, GPS, 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, mega 32GB memory, expandable of course, build quality out of the top drawer and much, much more. STEVEN AMBROSE slipped his SIM card into this technical tour de force, and set out to see if the user experience matched up to the design.
Nokia have held a large chunk of the cellular market for a good while and have been the top dog as far as smartphones are concerned for years. Symbian, their now wholly-owned operating system, had played a part in this dominance. In the last year, however, all this has begun to unravel, Nokia still dominates for the moment, but other brands, notably the Apple iPhone and the BlackBerry, have been making solid strides into Nokia territory.

In the fast changing world of cellular phones, a year is a long time and, for the past few months, it has become apparent that the current batch of Nokia devices are finally beginning to show their age. The user interfaces are dating, fast, and this is the reason that the latest Nokia devices, including the N97, are falling a little short of the mark.

Back to the N97. In true Nokia fashion, the device is beautifully made. Just unboxing and holding the N97 is a wonderful feeling, but set me up for a bit of a disappointing experience. The build quality of the phone is excellent, it is a large squareish slider phone with a full QWERTY keyboard; the solid thunk as you open the N97 and the smooth way it slides up to a predetermined angle, combine into an engineering masterpiece. The screen is good but, compared to the latest screens from other smartphones, it is below par.

The first inkling that all is not well with this Nokia was the time it took to start up. I had to try a few times to get the phone to boot up and while the time it took would have been fine for a laptop running Windows Vista, it was not acceptable for a mobile device of this nature.

The next disappointment was the response of the screen and the device in general. Resistive touch screens are not nearly as responsive as the capacitive type found, for example, on the iPhone. However the Nokia does resistive as well as most, if not better. The upside is that you can use a stylus and write on the screen for character recognition. The slight lack of responsiveness of the resistive screen, coupled with what in my opinion is the biggest oversight on the device, the 424MHz processor, makes the interface jerky and very hard to navigate.

My interaction with the N97 lacked any fluidity and was extremely irritating, as the obvious lag and jerk of the screen interfered with basic operations, such as making a call.

All the N97’s competitors have faster processors and more memory. Having briefly tried the same Symbian operating system on a much higher powered device, I have to say Nokia have crippled the N97 with the processor supplied. Load up the Twitter client, mail, and the web browser, and the already slow response moved down a whole lot of notches, well into unusable territory.

The Symbian operating system is also showing its age: doing a simple thing like making a call takes far too many pushes and clicks and whacks at the screen. Interestingly, the same operating system on the E75 works fine. Though it still has too many clicks, pushing responsive buttons is not nearly as irritating.

In general, this version of Symbian is not optimised for touch interaction and it shows, making the user work far too much to do simple tasks. You are also asked to confirm and reconfirm your choices, too many times, often for no logical reason. On balance, the operating system makes the phone usable, but it is never intuitive. In fact, it can become highly irritating if you are in a rush to make a call or answer an email, and generally are having a busy day.

Among the great features of the phone was the camera: fast, good detail, low noise, and a bright fast flash, for an LED unit. The N97’s video recorder is also usable and its integration is great. The built-in FM transmitter is wonderful: no more cables just tune in and use the music on the roomy internal drive in your car, boat, plane, you choose.
The 3.5mm headphone jack is welcome, and something all smartphones should have. The N97 also is one of the first units from Nokia to exclusively have the micro USB jack for charging and syncing. Another standard Nokia feature is the Nokia Suite for syncing your phone to a computer. This was and remains the standard: fast, effective and unobtrusive. Also supplied is the new Ovi suite, which is more multimedia-based, and this was not very good. A Beta of the Ovi suite showed great promise, but was far too unstable for general use. My recommendation is to stick with the Nokia PC suite for now.

The built-in browser is also very good. I really liked the way it handles multiple pages when going back and forward; it is also fast and very usable. The ability to see flash sites is also rare, and welcome. Generally, web pages rendered well.

The N97 also has a range of built-in widgets and one of these takes you to the recently launched Ovi app store. The Ovi store, similar in concept to the Apple iPhone store, is really new and has a limited range of apps for download; the majority are not free and are rather expensively priced in Euros. Nokia are taking the store seriously, and while the current quality and range are questionable, I am sure that it will fast develop into something impressive.

In conclusion, I was very disappointed. I loved the build and the feel, but I am not sure where to start on the user interface. On other Nokia devices, such as the E series, it is a little dated and somewhat clunky, but overall very useable. On the N97, it is simply bad and it makes the device unusable for a busy working day. The user Interface is dated and completely inconsistent: sometimes one tap will work and other times two are needed - I never got to understand when. Gestures or flicking did not work, except in arbitrary applications.

Nokia need to beef up the processor, double the system memory and then, maybe, the N97 will come to life. This device will in all probability sell well, based on reputation alone. However, we at Gadget can’t recommend this over many other similar multimedia powerhouses.