- The display is a big plus on this receiver. The contents are clearly visible even in bright sunlight, with good contrast and it's easy to read information.
- Compared to GPSMAP in power saving mode, the display doesn't switch off with display timeout. It's always on which is a plus.
- New and charged standard model Eneloop NiMH cells were put into it. It had been left on with Satellites set to GPS overnight. Battery widget still shows full bars this morning even though the unit was showing the track it's currently navigating all night. This suggests exceptional battery life.
- At many times, when the unit is powered off, it appears to switch on automatically immediately. This appears to be a bug.
- The body of the unit is uncomfortable to hold due to a hard plastic and clunky shape with edges. It is grippy due to the rubber over the switches, but the GPSMAP in comparison is far more comfortable to hold and interact with.
- The GNSS fix takes time to reach higher accuracy. The highest accuracy I saw was 3m with multiple contellations, but it lost that accuracy with small movement. However, the actual location shown appears accurate. I am yet to check how the actual accuracy is when walking in the city environment with buildings and trees.
- The elevation shown is always incorrect. The true elevation is 50m, and it shows 90m-200m+. When it is at 200m, it doesn't resolve towards the true elevation. In comparison, the GPSMAP 65s's error is about 5%.
- The compass is, for the most part, slightly inaccurate. It is accurate to around +/- 5 degrees depending on how the device was moved into that heading. I re-caliberated it several times to check. Sometimes it shows wildly inaccurate readings such as South where East should be, and freezes sometimes (just the compass). I suspect this is happening when there's a change in GNSS fix.
- It expects GPX track names to use a specific set of characters (e.g., not too long names and no characters such as "@" in the track name). It first appears to convert tracks from .gpx files put into the NewFiles directory, into .fit files with the track name as filename + .fit, and then I assume it tries to move them into the Courses or Activities directory, but that operation fails and the files remain in the NewFiles directory. If they're named with simple names such as "A.fit" and put into the Courses or Activities directory, the unit doesn't finish booting. However, if the track names in the GPX files are cleaned up, it converts them and shows them in the Saved menu.
- The UI and physical button layout is unintuitive. It's uncomfortable to use this coming from a GPSMAP, but I'll put that down to personal preference, and not something bad about the device.
- I have not yet experienced any random restarts so far, and am watching out for them. It does have this irritating bug of automatically powering on immediately after poweroff.
The GPSMAP 65s is a much more comfortable device to hand-hold for long durations walking and hiking. That's my TLDR.