Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My daughter had a geocaching class in high school and her positive experience got my wife and I interested in the activity. Geocaching has taken us to locations that we would never have found on our own. After using my wife's smartphone to find more than 1,000 geocaches, we decided to purchase a dedicated GPS unit, mostly because the phone's battery life was short with the GPS enabled and we could not store maps of large areas in the phone. We purchased the Garmin Oregon 650t from Amazon in July 2013. Our initial experience was good, but the more we use it, the more problems we have. In my mind I had reduced the "star" rating from 5 to 2, but after our experience today I would have to rate the unit as 1 star. Here is a short pro/con summary: Pros: Built-in camera Can store thousands of geocaches Ability to use third-party maps Cons: Included maps are not routable Software frequently freezes Poor battery life Price I paid extra for the Oregon 650t with US topographic map, but I was disappointed that the map was not routable - you can not enter a destination and ask the GPS to guide you. To get this functionality I downloaded free OpenStreetMap.org maps which worked great. If you do purchase this unit, save yourself some money on the Garmin maps and download your own free maps. The Garmin website specifies that the battery life of the Oregon 650t is 16 hours. We found the battery life to be more like 2 hours. I contacted Garmin support and after several weeks of exchanging e-mails and following their configuration and test recommendations, they agreed that the original battery pack was defective and sent me a new one. The new battery pack was better than the first one, but had no where near 16 hours of life in real use. My wife wanted to do a long series of caches for her birthday so we downloaded the details for more than 100 caches into the Oregon 650t, fully charged it overnight, and set out for a full day of caching. Fortunately, we reached our goal of 50 caches after about five hours, because that's as long as the battery lasted. You might get 16 hours of battery life if you turned on the unit and left it on the counter, but you won't get anything like that if you use it for geocaching. During our birthday caching session the Oregon 650t froze 7 times. It froze 5 times while trying to log a cache as "found" and 2 times it simply froze while we were navigating towards a cache. I contacted Garmin support about this problem and they suggested downloading the latest software and reloading the caches. I tried this, but on our next geocaching outing the unit froze after finding 7 caches. The power button would not reset the unit. To recover after the unit froze I had to remove the battery pack. Today we went for a hike in our local mountains and I took the GPS along to track our route. I simply turned on the Oregon 650t and locked the display. I did not enter a destination, no routing, no geocaching. After an hour of hiking my wife asked me how far we had traveled. I checked the Oregon 650t and found that it was frozen. Again the power button would not reset the unit; the battery pack had to be removed to recover. This was the worst performance of the Oregon 650t to date and prompted me to write this review with a 1 star rating. I am very disappointed in the Garmin Oregon 650t, especially considering its high cost. I would not recommend the Garmin Oregon 650t to anyone.