On Saturday, April 30, 2011 8:13:08 PM UTC-4, gerry wrote:
> I bought the 850 several years ago because it could be operated while
> a pedestrian, and it had a replaceable battery. I finally got to use
> it as a pedestrian walking the streets of 'Barcelona. It was
> useless. It often sent me in the wrong direction and was generally
> misleading. Although it found my location accurately, it never
> directed me to my destination with any accuracy. I can only surmise
> that the pedestrian mode doesn't work and the directions are the same
> as if I was driving.
> Battery life is very limited, about 4 hours.

I am leaving for Barcelona next week and will be using my 3790LMT with the Barcelona cityXplorer map.

I've been playing around with it using GPS Simulator Mode and it appears to work well. I will let you know when I return.

Without the cityXplorer map things are different if you don't have a GPS with the European 'normal' maps installed. That may be your problem. If cityXplorer can be loaded into your GPS then the $9.99 might be a good investment.

I like the way it can guide me to metros and by foot -- and if I wanted to drive it would do that too.

Gary Hayman
Garmin Tricks & Tips website
http://bit.ly/garmin_gps_tricks

On Sun, 1 May 2011 04:39:59 -0700 (PDT),
zydecogary <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On Saturday, April 30, 2011 8:13:08 PM UTC-4, gerry wrote:

>> I bought the 850 several years ago because it could be operated
>> while a pedestrian, and it had a replaceable battery. I
>> finally got to use it as a pedestrian walking the streets of
>> 'Barcelona. It was useless.

> Without the cityXplorer map things are different if you don't
> have a GPS with the European 'normal' maps installed. That may
> be your problem. If cityXplorer can be loaded into your GPS then
> the $9.99 might be a good investment.

I was thinking the same as Gary. In trips to various parts of the
world (Milan, Munich, Tokyo, Beijing) I've used opensource maps
from the lambertus site on my etrex Vista HCx, and have had mixed
results. All were nominally routable maps, and some worked
reasonably well and some were pretty poor. The gps device's
ability to find and route you to a destination depends on the
quality of the maps.

For what it's worth, here's the URL to the open source maps I
mentioned:

http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/


> ...Battery life is very limited, about 4 hours.

This is one of the reasons I selected the Vista--it uses commonly
available AA batteries, and runs something like 20 hours on a
fresh set.

--
Theodore (Ted) Heise <(E-Mail Removed)> Bloomington, IN, USA