I know a lot of members have Garmins and I have a 200 which has died.

Finally getting around to replacing and have finances to get one of the following:
Touring – £175
800 – £180

Use will be for:
– travelling in Estonia (I know I can add maps onto both from other forum conversations and here)
– commuting to work (10 miles)
– off road rides in UK
– road rides in UK

I am not to worried about the race functions / pace alerts / hrm that can be added to the 800…

Will the touring be sufficient for off road rides in UK?

I use the Touring Plus for all of the above and it’s been excellent.

I don’t want all the added training functions so no need for an 800 or 810.

Facing the same indecision! (Along with whether to just bar mount my iphone instead!) Wanting it for:

– road cycling, both “on the go navigation” (ie no route loaded) and to load GPX routes to follow. For use in both UK and Europe

– occasional hiking navigation in the hills

– occasional mountain biking

– might want to consider occasional HR monitor use, but not interested in anything else.

Does the touring have the bluetooth/wifi connectivity? That’s the functionality I really want to save having to use a data cable.

There’s been various posts about the touring and seems like some people gave struggled to add the maps.
Any link to the 800 at £180?

Sorry to complicate things, but it might be worth looking at the Dakota 20 too. One big advantage (in my eyes) is that it runs off AA batteries so it’s easier to keep it going on multi-day outdoor trips.

I have a touring and had a few issues with the standard maps for off road use as not all bridal ways are loaded, for road and touring use the standard maps are great.
but if you can get an 800 for only a fiver more id go with that. The touring is essential a 800 or 810 without the training functions and added in built mapping capabilities (round trip planning built in etc.).

Just got a touring plus. Very, very good.

The one very useful feature is the ride generator – type in how far you want to ride and it generates three random routes – took me on a great route locally which had never done before.

Maps are excellent and directions easy to follow.

Much prefer to the 500 it replaced.

I’ve used both the 800 and the Touring Plus recently. The 800 is massively better, the Touring is quite crippled.

Importantly, as far as I can see you can only see a route on the Touring screen if you first ask it to navigate it. Not so bad with a TCX file, but with a GPX track the Touring will recalculate the route and you can’t prevent it. Also, the map display is barely customisable, so it’s full of clutter.

There are a load of other restrictions too. I was surprised and disappointed just how much the Touring had cut out in terms of clearly following pre-planned routes. Personally I think it’s a fairly poorly-thought out device unless you’re happy to live with Garmin’s on-device route calculation, which in my experience is not a good idea. I didn’t try using the Touring off-road but unless I missed something buried in an inaccessible part of the menus – and I think I trawled everything repeatedly – I very much suspect it would be just about useless in terms of off-road navigation.

The 800, however, is quite fantastic. Much, much more flexible and configurable (the difference in clarity between the Touring map display and the configuration I’ve set on the 800 is night and day), and as far as I can see (early days) it handles pre-planned stuff much better.

There’s a very detailed comparison here (scroll down to the big table):

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2013/08/garmin-touring-computer.html

Verdict seems to be 800 over Touring. It seems that the only thing that the Touring offers over the 800 is the round-trip route creation, which isn’t something I could see myself ever using anyway.

I pored over the tables before buying but they don’t really cover some crucial things.

– Can you make the maps really clear on-screen?
– Can you overlay a course on the map and use “follow the wiggly line” navigation, ie switch turn alerts off?
– Can you see multiple tracks/courses at once?

All of these and more are “yes” for the 800 and “no” for the Touring.

For those of you with the 800, what’s the mapping like for Europe? I’ll be trundling round some small Italian villages and towns, and it would be good to not get lost!

Take a look at Openstreetmap maps online. You can download them (via eg Talkytoaster, Openfietsmap) at any time and they’ll be pretty much the same (may be a few days out of date). I think Garmin used to have a tool for previewing their maps before buying them, but if they did then I don’t know if they still do.