Great review and thanks for taking the time to post it. Have you experimented with the turn by turn voice yet? I have a 3 year old Nuvi and a loud Jeep and I can barely hear my Nuvi's speaker. I heard the latest models can play the voice through the car's radio via an FM signal but it sounds like this feature was left out of the Montana. I'd really like to hear more about the Montana's speaker if you've used it.

widget, I know what you mean with gloves and touchscreens. I haven't tried it with gloves on, I'll have to experiment with it.

Roarmeister, my bad, didn't mean a hard drive, I'm not sure what they are using for internal 3.5 gigs of memory, the external memory is a microsd card, the internal has to be some sort of flash memory.

NuggetHoarder, I use it in both my car and truck using the garmins external speaker cradle and it's pretty loud with no problem hearing it. As for a jeep without the top it may be harder to hear. It has a headset jack identical to a laptop and you can run it into a amp which will go trough your speakers or use one of those audio to FM transmitters that are real cheap and transmit it to the radio station and crank it up. This is the mount I got and the speaker is pretty loud but without the jeep top might need boosted a little. https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=89574
The turn by turn navigation is the same like the Nuvi, it gives you a boat load of different voices to use in all different languages.

And thanks all for the kind posts.

Excellent review F5K!! I like your list of pro's and con's. They sum up your thought well.

Question to you and others who might theorize ...

Do you have any idea why the GPS is so large and "brick" like?

I know they can put the GPS receiver in a tiny package, and would suspect that the display can be kept fairly small (ala smart phones), so that leads me to wonder if the size is mostly related to the battery - power needes - and needing to provide sufficient hours of operation.

I tend to wonder if the large color display has a substantial power consumption (as does my Droid 2) and thus they need to include a fairly large battery.

Just wondering.

widget, I went to the extreme today and put on Snow Ski gloves and could use the unit with no problems, I just had these big fingers but adapted very quickly.

NuggetHoarder, I was thinking about trying to make a video for you to show the audio capabilities. If I get some time I'll try and do that.

KenK, I still don't know why the big case, I have a droid as well with a camera. The unit has a external antenna port, headset port and a mini usb port, has the camera built in, a GPS antenna and a wireless antenna as well for the Garmin wireless unit transfer plus the battery pack consumes a lot of the space since it has a dual function with the 2 battery options. It is built like a tank, I would seriously doubt you will hurt this thing and in a worse case scenario, you can throw it at a charging bear and put it's eye out One thing is the chip set with this unit is phenomenal, I have never had a unit lock on to sats so quickly and coverage. I was very impressed I can turn the unit off and go a long way out and have it aquire my location so quickly.

Izzy, I saw the new etrex line up and they look good, I had considered them before buying this unit but I had gotten tired of the old joystick feature from the old HCX models, that is why I went to the Dakota a while back for the touchscreen. Plus my eyes aren't as good as they were when I was young and needed a bigger screen instead of putting glasses on to look at the screen on the etrex series. I didn't see too much improvement with the new design except for the faster chip set, screen resolution and a tougher shell. If you like that style it would be a improvement. I had wished more they had improved on the Dakota's screen brightness.

Good to know it can be worked with gloves, thanks for that. I know my HTC Incredible 2 would be a challenge with a glove on, I don't use any nav features on it though. I have my trusty old Map 60 Cx which has served me well. I also have a Nuvi 255W for the cars and it works very well. I do need to update my maps though. What am I waiting for!