Garmin Montana

Nice.

Hey, maybe there is a use for the Tempe for me after all! Since the Beemer has it's own thermometer, I never thought about buying one, but we are often concerned whether the frozen food will stay frozen on the way back from Costco, a two hour drive.

Anybody know the upper limit of transmit distance?

I don't know what the official distance is but it transmits at least 20 feet in my house, through wood and drywall walls.

And about 10 feet from the trunk to my dash.

These figures are my own observations - I can't find a published spec for that, and I haven't tried to see how far I could get from the Tempe to the gps.

A normal USB cable would fit, not sure what came with the Montana, the pocket is open on the top and some of cable might stick out, but the side with the backbone i put the Montana front/glass facing to protect it, so the side with pocket, well if the cable end rattled around they would only hit the back of the Montana.

what's going on? 3 whole days and no newbie questions?? it's like the whole world is shellshocked Broncos fans or something, I thought that was just us in Colorado..

Ok I'll ask another one... I know it's been answered but a few minutes of googling and I can't find it, must not be searching for the correct term, sorry...

So in map view when you accidentally touch the screen too lightly and it is trying to mark a waypoint and the red pin shows up.... so annoying! Is there a way to turn this off or what is a suggestion?

thanks.

Close the pushpin by clicking the X on the right side of the details screen.

ok well there's that yes.

But is there anyway to PREVENT the pushpin from popping up in the first place? Or a workaround of some sort to minimize the effect?

I am willing to push 18 menu items IF I even want to set a waypoint! It is just something I RARELY want to do, and I touch the screen a LOT and it is annoying as hell!

If you touch the screen and pause before swiping, the screen will move and a pin will not drop.
If you touch short and quick, a pin drops.
That's about the best I've found and agree, I wish I could bypass it somehow.

Wow. Very useful to know.

That's what I would have suggested as well. It's possible to do a lot of screen scrolling and not drop pins as long as you use your technique.

There isn't anything in the software to prevent dropping pins.

When I first started using the Montana the pin drops really bothered my, now I ignore them.
They are also useful when you want to see the name of a road but don't want to have to zoom in.
I do wish the little arrow to hide the dashboard was a bigger. I have a hell of a time getting that to work with gloves.

ok thanks.

I knew that from experimentation and have been trying to re-train myself to do the "long touch" first.. i.e. pause before swiping... it is what it is and it's not an iPad as far as screen touch goes. Just have to remember what device I'm actually using at the moment!

Thanks!

+1

There are times where you want the pushpin - you can leave it on the screen and drag the map around under the pin, and it tells you what that location represents.

I was experimenting with this same issue and found the pause technique works. The pin can be annoying.

Well, I guess you get to learn something new every day!

I've had it since last May and never knew that! Sometimes the pin would show up, sometimes not, I could not figure out why.:huh

Thanks Dude!

So I thought I'd do some experimenting with the zoom buttons, with which I end up getting a pin instead of a zoom about 2/3rds of the time; one of the most annoying things about the unit, since that's the control I use the most. It appears that the zoom buttons have a similar reaction to how they are touched. If you stab at them you are very likely to get a pin, much more so when riding, because your hand is bouncing somewhat and the stab is not real accurate. The following is for vertical orientation, the only one I use on a bike.

If, however, you place the tip of your finger on the edge of the frame and roll it to the left onto the button and wait until the zoom changes, you are much more likely to get a zoom instead of a pin. You may go two levels until you train your finger, but this is still way better than the damn pin.

Trying this with gloves on, when using my right index finger it seemed to work OK, but with the left, which those of us without cruise control must use, it didn't work at all, until I hit on the bright idea of pointing my left index finger as if it was a pistol, meaning the fingernail was vertical, and getting the area of the glove finger tip right over the nail to contact the screen button while the tip of the finger was still on the frame edge.
My success rate went from about 10% to 80%!!!! Maybe I'll have to grow my left index nail long!

Now I doubt that this will work with heavy winter gloves, the tip area is just too large. For a while I used DRTBK's method by gluing the little plastic bumpers to the glove fingertip, but they kept falling off and didn't seem to improve matters all that much. I may try them again with this approach, now that I know just how sensitive the screen is to different types of touches.

I'm still hoping that the Beta team will enlalrge these buttons as that's the only sure fix.

Thanks to all for helping resolve problems I've been having with two of the most annoying "features" on the Montana, that blasted pushpin and those troublesome zoom controls. In short: Don't tap, press. Awesome!

Furthermore, if you press and hold the zoom control, you can zoom in or out as many levels as you like without seeing the pushpin.

And I agree that best results are obtained if you approach the zoom controls from the edge of the display rather than the middle. Larger buttons would help as would left side zoom contols on the Nuvi dashboard.

One other thing I just noticed is that whenever you are in a list, i.e. drawer, POI list, Waypoint list, Setup list, etc. you can page down the list by a finger flick, just like an Ipod, as long as you don't stab at it.
A narrow scroll bar appears on the right margin while doing so. Quite handy for long lists.

It's not too surprising that Garmin has not touted this much!. (Don't tell Apple fanatics!)

Being an iPhone and iPad user, I knew about this long ago.

Also, like the iDevices, if you hold your finger on an icon, it sticks to your finger and can be placed elsewhere.

How long before Apple sues for copyright infringement, you figure?

Not long, I figure!:huh