Club Homepage Forums Classified Ads Buy & Sell - Everything But Airplanes Garmin 296

Mr. Phillips:

Bravo, and thankyou. Your humor is greatly appreciated.

So I wonder how much a talking GPS is worth. Further, does it have a woman's voice? I can see it now:"Hey, dimwit, can't you see the airport? I led you right to it...I guess I have to do everything around here!"

The last thing I need is a nagging co-pilot. I got away from that when I was done with my instructor.

I'm with you, Hung. My son has one of those talking Garmins in his car. Man, is that annoying!

The 296 I have talks to you in "automotive" mode. So, I guess they are just beefing up the software to talk to you in aviation mode..."approaching Class B Airspace in 10 minutes...". If you aren't paying any more attention to your flying than that, get a new job.

Of course, it already has terrain warnings. They should just release new software for the 296 and 396.

There must be more to this. Garmin is a super attractive company financially and I can't see them getting away with this as a "major announcement".

Paul

From AVWeb 7/20/2006

Garmin?s GPSMAP 496 Debuts at OSH
Try as it might, Garmin couldn?t keep the cat in the bag. The company had hoped to embargo news of its new GPSMAP 496 until EAA AirVenture. But as it always seems to, the news leaked out into cyberspace and Garmin threw in the towel on Wednesday, with a press release on its Web site. The new 496 is a follow-on product to the wildly successful GPSMAP 396, the first portable GPS to feature datalinked weather from WxWorx. Other features include detailed taxi maps for airports, AOPA?s Airport Directory data, a faster processor and higher resolution in depicted terrain data. All this comes at a price, of course: $2,795 suggested retail, making it the most expensive portable ever. If you?d like to get your mitts on one, AVweb will be giving one away at AirVenture, in addition to daily drawings for GPSMAP 96s and Apple iPODs. All you have to do is attend AirVenture and sign up at AVweb?s booth, A-1007/1008. Our sister publication, Aviation Consumer, plans a detailed report on the GPSMAP 496 in its September 2006 issue. See Garmin's Web site for more.

That's not quite true, there are a number of changes. I think the biggest one for me is the increased update rate. The terrain resolution might be nice, and the airspace changes, but they don't seem to be a big deal. Besides, the 396 already has voice prompting for terrain, towers, and traffic warnings (plus street navigation prompts).