Garmin Promotion

magellans maps are worse, and i found the software on the pc unstable....

Who was the retailer? Garmin aside for a moment, if the retailer sold you something that's dis-functional for the first two months under false pretences, I'm fairly sure the Consumer Guarantees Act would have something to say about it, at least if the purchase was covered by New Zealand law. At the very least you'd expect them to offer you a complete refund if they couldn't fix the problem reasonably quickly. And yes, the law requires that the retailer take responsibility if that's who you purchased from. Here's the summary of the law from the NZ Consumer's Institute: http://www.consumer.org.nz/reports/consumer-guarantees-act/putting-it-right I don't have much bad to say about Garmin in general on that scale, but I think it's often worth its weight in gold to buy from a specialist GPS retailer with a good service reputation when buying this kind of stuff. Tony Savage who runs KiwiGPS in Christchurch is my own choice and he's been mentioned on this site a few times, but there are a few.

These websites might help with some alternative free maps for new zealand http://nzopengps.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19:garmin-dakota-20-comments&catid=9:gps-use-and-applications&Itemid=17 http://nzopengps.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12:topo-maps&catid=9:gps-use-and-applications&Itemid=17 http://www.gwprojects.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1561&start=495

That's a bit disappointing about Garmin :( If individual Topo50 map sheets will suffice for now you can download Garmin Custom Maps / Google Earth kmz files from the download tab on http://www.topomap.co.nz

Ever wondered about a persons first and only post being something like this. We dont even know if this is supposed to represent a NZ experience. What the bet that if this person ever posts again it will be to promote the virtues of some gps we have never heard of or ugg boots

i half expect the post to be legit, the vendors have a monopoly and if they are shifting enough gear and not worried about making sales when there effectively arent any decint rivals or many rivals in the market they dont have to give a stuff. we get ripped off y a lot of outdoors vendors because they have a monopoly on distribution in nz and if thy are dealing in a well known brand its all money in the bank, as much as they can get away fleecing us for... i bought some $400 salomon boots, a proprietary lace hook broke, the shop sent it to salomon who then sent it to get fixed in timaru of all places.... no doubt a cheap cobbler.. who didnt have the replacement part, no communication back to me , i chased it up after two weeks and salomon only then got in touch with the cobbler to find out what happened... otherwise i'd never have gotten a response... luckily salomon issued a credit for the boots and i bought a different model that didnt have that design of lace hook... so why were salomon using some cobbler from a remote town in nz that wasnt adequately supplied with the parts to do the job properly? to save money, they certainly charge a lot more for their boots here than they charge for them overseas.... the distributor isnt interested in the best service, he's interested in making as much as he can get away with. i can use a mail forwarding company to get salomons a lot cheaper from overseas i'm not interested in supporting a distributor who behaves like that. or i'll look at other brands... i think some of these distributors think they are home and hosed once they get hold of an established brand.... all money in the bank.

Hi, I recently bought a Garmin eTrex 30 as I was aware of the free promotion for the free topo maps. If you had investigated the promotion more fully, it did state it could take up to 8 weeks for the maps to arrive, it took about 4 weeks to arrive. you can still use the GPS with out the maps. I see that the free version was V3 now on their web site they have V4 so looks like the promtion was soley an exercise in off loading the older version. I'm not that impressed with the detail of the maps, but it does have alot of information on points of interest. Has anyone used the Topo4GPS maps on a GPS as this looks more like our 1:50000 maps. the eTrx 30 is great improvement over the old etrexs, I can use a heartrate monitor with it and download onto PC Basecamp programme which gives you graphs comparing height with heartrate or elevation ( just the thing for a gear junky) and you can down load a birdseye view like goggle maps and superimpose onto the area where you have been. I've been tracking my MTB rides and believe it or not how long it take to mow my lawns and how manys kms in total - I have a large corner section which is mainly council land but I have to maintain it. It usually take 1 1/2 to mow 3kms and workout heartrate. Oh yea looking forward to a tramp around Lake Waikaremoana next week with my daughter, then I will do the Tongariro northen circuit and a few day walks into some old haunts in the Tauraruas.

Here's a copy of the promotion flyer with the terms and conditions on page 2 (pdf): http://www.ja-gps.com.au/promos/free-topo-2012.pdf It's term 14 that states it might take up to 8 weeks. This seems to be an Aussie version of the flyer (if there was any difference), but it looks fine to me unless the kiwi terms said anything different, or unless the retailer misled or outright lied and didn't show the actual offer. If that's the case, though, the gripe should be with the retailer and not with Garmin.