Jay Honeck wrote:

Garmin truly has a winner here, but it's not quite a grand slam. It will be
when they (a) set up the unit in "portrait" mode (which is far more useful
than a "landscape" view for aviation), and (b) when they enlarge that stupid
dinky screen!

I have a 295 which has a slightly smaller screen with the same landscape
orientation. Before that I had a 195, which is portrait. When I first
got the 295, the landscape mode really bugged me. But after I got the
map screen set up the way I wanted, my map was square, so it didn't
matter. The same was true on my 195. Once you add the fields for
waypoint distance/eta, altitude, airspeed, course and track, both
orientations ended up with a square map. Given that, I find the
landscape mode easier to use; i.e. it's easier to look from the map to
the right than it is to look from the map to the top or bottom of the
screen. At least it is for me.

As for the screen size, I don't think I'll be truly happy until I get
get a 15" MFD on my panel, so while I won't argue with you that the
screen size needs to be bigger, I also realize that no handheld will be
big enough for my desire. In spite of that, my 295 screen (1.8 x 3.3
(compared to 2.1 x 3.2 on the 396)) is easy to read and I don't have any
trouble using it even in hardball IFR.


-m
--
## Mark T. Dame
## VP, Product Development
## MFM Software, Inc. (http://www.mfm.com/)
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