Garmin Dakota 10 2.6-Inch Touchscreen Handheld GPS Navigator
- Sunlight-readable, 2.6-inch color touchscreen display
- High-sensitivity GPS with HotFix satellite prediction
- Built to withstand the elements: bumps, dust, dirt and water
- Preloaded with a worldwide basemap plus has 850 MB of free internal memory for map transfers
- Bike and Hike bundle includes bike mount kit and City Navigator North America DVD
Dakota 10 Bike & Hike Bundle
Package Includes:
- Dakota 10
- City Navigator NT
- Bike Mount
Outdoor navigation meets touchscreen simplicity in Dakota 10. This rugged, palm-sized navigator boasts touchscreen navigation, high-sensitivity GPS with HotFixT satellite prediction, and a worldwide basemap in one affordable, power-packed punch.
Touch and Go
Dakota 10 makes outdoor navigation effortless with a tough, sunlight-readable, 2.6 inch color touchscreen display. The interface is easy to use, so you’ll spend more time enjoying the outdoors and less time searching for information. Both durable and waterproof, Dakota 10 is built to withstand the elements: bumps, dust, dirt and water are no match for this rugged navigator.
Find Fun
Get into paperless geocaching with Dakota 10 by quickly downloading up to 2,000 caches, with information such as location, terrain, difficulty, hints and description - no more paper print outs and manually entered coordinates. Visit our geocaching pages for more information.
Explore the Terrain
Dakota 10 comes with built-in worldwide basemap, so you can navigate anywhere with ease. Adding more maps is easy with Garmin’s wide array of detailed topographic, marine and road maps, which can be loaded to internal memory.
Dakota 10: Touchscreen navigation for the great outdoors.Amazon.com Product Description
Outdoor navigation meets touchscreen simplicity in Dakota 10. This rugged, palm-sized navigator boasts touchscreen navigation, high-sensitivity GPS with HotFix satellite prediction, and a worldwide basemap in one affordable, power-packed punch.
 Touchscreen navigation, high-sensitivity GPS with HotFix satellite prediction, and a worldwide basemap. Click to enlarge. |
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| (Click on image below to change view.) 2.6-inch touchscreen with easy-to-use interface. |
 Bundle Pack includes a bike mount kit and a City Navigator North America DVD. Click to enlarge. |
Touchscreen navigation for the great outdoors.
Touch and Go
Dakota 10 makes outdoor navigation effortless with a tough, sunlight-readable, 2.6 inch color touchscreen display. The interface is easy to use, so you’ll spend more time enjoying the outdoors and less time searching for information. Both durable and waterproof, Dakota 10 is built to withstand the elements: bumps, dust, dirt and water are no match for this rugged navigator.
Find Fun
Get into paperless geocaching with Dakota 10 by quickly downloading up to 2,000 caches, with information such as location, terrain, difficulty, hints and description — no more paper print outs and manually entered coordinates.
Explore the Terrain
Dakota 10 comes with built-in worldwide basemap, so you can navigate anywhere with ease. Adding more maps is easy with Garmin’s wide array of detailed topographic, marine and road maps, which can be loaded to internal memory.
Bike and Hike Bundle
This bundle includes a bicycle mount and the City Navigator North America DVD with your Dakota 10.Bike Mount
Take your Dakota to the streets or to the trail for great fitness use. Just snap it into this bike mount and you’re ready to ride. The mount comes with four cable ties and fits up to a one-inch diameter bar.
City Navigator North America
With nearly 6 million points of interest and detailed road coverage for the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico, City Navigator North America delivers all the data you need to navigate North America. City Navigator brings you the most detailed street maps available so you can navigate with exact, turn-by-turn directions to any address or intersection. You can also route to restaurants, gas stations, hotels, attractions and more. Powered by NAVTEQ, a world leader in premium-quality digital map data.
- Displays nearly 6 million points of interest — hotels, restaurants, parking, entertainment, fuel, shopping and more.
- Includes highways, interstates, business and residential roads in metropolitan and rural areas.
- Includes detailed information such as turn restrictions, roundabout guidance, speed categories and other navigation features.
- Gives turn-by-turn directions on your compatible Garmin device.
- Includes MapSource, computer software that lets you plan trips on your computer and transfer waypoints, routes and tracks between your computer and your Garmin device.
What’s in the Box
Dakota 10, Lanyard, USB cable, Owner’s manual on disk, Quick start manual, Bike mount, City Navigator North America DVD
Garmin Dakota 10 2.6-Inch Touchscreen Handheld GPS Navigator
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Posted by Rhodos
on Mar 19 2010. Filed under Technology.
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Warning: despite the name “Bike and Hike Bundle” this device does NOT work with the Garmin cycling accessories like Speed/Cadence sensor and Heart Rate strap. They crippled it.
The next model up, the Dakota 20, DOES work with the bike add-ons (but is not offered in the “bike and hike” bundle). Bizarre marketing decision by Garmin.
Rating: 2 / 5
I recently decided to start spending some time geocaching with my son. I finally settled on either the Geomate, Jr., the Garmin Dakota, Garmin Oregon or DeLorme PN-40. I asked questions at forums, looked at on-line reviews, checked out the ones I could find in stores (Oregon and PN-20) and finally decided on either the Dakota 10 (a great price on a bundle was the big attraction at the time) or the Oregon 300. The Geomate got great reviews and the most reasonably priced of the group, but it’s only good for one thing, geocaching, tho it does it well. The PN-40 also got pretty good reviews, but the screen is smaller than the Oregon’s, the computer software is in addition to the device purchase and an annual subscription (at a very fair price tho) is needed for all the available advertised map features. It’s also a device with a pretty steep learning curve, especially on the trip planning side. That left the Dakota and Oregon. My two concerns on the Dakota 10 was lack of an SD slot, and a lower resolution screen than the Oregon. But for $100 savings I took a gamble and ordered the Dakota geocache and hike bundle. Turns out my worries were all for naught.
This little navigator has been a pleasant surprise. Dead simple to use, the menus made sense right out of the box, screen sensitively is excellent, even text-entry on the touch-screen is surprisingly easy and accurate. The bundle included the 100K US maps on DVD, which while very good were not as detailed as I had hoped. Not to worry. FREE user-contributed maps are available and many are very good to absolutely excellent. The Florida 24K topo I found at GPSFileDepot was in the latter category. Bathyspheric data, roads, trails, poi’s, extended text descriptions of land features like springs, waterways, landmarks, historical features. All I could ask for, no added charge. No other manufacturer has a following creating compatible maps like Garmin’s. And a recent Garmin application update has even added the ability to easily import and use raster maps(ie, paper maps, attractions maps, etc) in your Dakota. I’m actually working on adding an early 1900’s Central Florida railroad map that I can overlay on my 24K topo for searching out old railway junctions and stations. With any luck I might dig up a little Florida history.
Here’s the best part, and something I didn’t know about in advance. Garmin’s “Profiles” is a powerful menu feature. Out of the box, the menus are customized/organized for specific uses like Geocaching, Recreational, Marine and Automotive. I modified my Automotive to use Garmin’s City Navigator (2009) map, Florida section only, with my 24K topographic maps disabled. I moved “Active Route” and “Route Planner” to the first page and customized the data I wanted displayed on my trip computer and compass pages, then saved it. Now when I tap Change Profile>Automotive, all my settings are ready to go. I customized Geocaching in the same manner, disabling road maps and enabling topo’s, even disabling “ground cover” display so the map screen is even easier to see. What other device other than Garmin’s Oregon series is this easy to use and set-up for your specific needs? Nothing that I’ve seen.
My only complaint, and it’s not even a serious issue, is screen readability. It seems all the newer high-resolution handheld screens suffer screen legibilty issues compared to the older devices like the tried-and-true 60CSx. So far no one has come up with a solution. The Dakota is certainly more readable than the Oregon, even tho the backlight is not as strong. I haven’t yet found a lighting condition that rendered the screen unreadable, unlike the Oregon I looked at side by side with it. Even the Oregon only needed to be turned a bit to see in light shade, a problematic light. Even when used tie-wrapped to my bike I never found the Dakota completely unreadable. But as mentioned by others, there’s room for improvement. For now it’s just a necessary trade-off for the better graphics and detail and easier use on these new off-road devices.
My concern on the lack of additional SD storage for maps was unwarranted. Loading the 24K map for the entire State of Florida, routable City Navigator road maps for all of Florida, 100K topos for Georgia and Alabama and a hundred or so geocache locations with details (gpx files) took less than 300MB of the available 850MB+ of on board storage. I don’t think I’m going to run out of space for hundred’s more geocache locations, waypoints, routes or even additional maps if needed. The Dakota 10 also lacks the tri-axial compass and barometric altimeter of the Dakota 20 (and Oregons), but I can’t see any situations where I would need those. The compass on the Dakota 10 is fine for almost all my uses and I have no need for the altimeter anyway, especially in Florida.
So all in all, I really have only a single complaint. Screen brightness in certain specific lighting conditions could be improved. But in MOST sun and shade conditions it’s not any problem whatsoever. My 14 year old son used it all day yesterday as both a highway navigator, calling out turns to me to an EarthCache, and a geocaching device once we got there with not a single complaint. Why is that important? He’s never used a handheld before. I only pointed out the “Profiles” feature and a one-minute tutorial on getting to and reading the road map screen. The rest he figured out on his own. That’s how simple it is to use. I honestly can’t think of anything I missed out on by passing up the Delorme PN-40 or even Garmin’s Oregon.
I recommend the Dakota highly.
Rating: 4 / 5
First Impressions: This unit has some nice features but the one thing it does NOT have is a “sunlight readable” screen, all Garmin “touch screen” models are much harder to read in the sun compared to the eTrex or 60Csx type models (regretfully these models are also very complex to use).
The main advantage of this Dakota unit is that it is better for paperless geocaching because it does display tips. The main disadvantage for geocachers, other than you can’t see the screen in sunlight, is that this unit does NOT offer “proximity alerts” like the 60CSx, this means you have to hold the unit in your hands constantly and with the screen set at its brightest setting to find the nearest cache, this is not only cumbersome but it also drains your batteries much, much faster. Any GPS without proximity alert is as close to useless as it gets.
Beware of the claim that Garmin makes about included maps, the maps that come built-in are pretty much useless, you will need to spend another $100 to buy a map that works.
A more detailed review coming soon.
Rating: 3 / 5