Garmin G2, talk about photography!

Garmin G2 cartography was announced in November, more detail came out in March, and now I’m actually looking at it, both versions. Yes, remember that G2 (or g2, as Garmin spells it) comes in two tiers. The 3210 I’m testing has G2’s of the whole U.S. built in; they are full detail charts with added major roads and some port info. But you have to buy and insert a G2 chart card to get all the photos, full street maps, and multiple POI’s seen above, and bigger here
. Pulled back a bit you’d see that there are about a dozen photos just for Camden, which rather amazed me. Some are oblique, some straight down, many are higher resolution than you’ve ever seen in a navigation product before. For instance, I can make out my 14’ Gizmo tied up in the shot below (bigger here). Garmin has a ways to go to make all this photographic wealth easily accessible—like making the icons more indicative of what the picture shows, and making it possible to page through all of a port’s pics without going back out to the chart—but I’m sure it will happen.  I also see a few errors in the port data but that’s nothing new. For instance, almost every electronic chart shows Willey Wharf and the Camden Town Landing as one place with a common phone number, but they are quite separate operations (there’s either been a lot of copying or data licensing going on). Also “Reseller Marina” is completely new to me and I’ve been in this harbor for 35 years and am on the Harbor Committee!  I’m looking forward to trying the 3210 and G2’s, both versions, on the water soon. (The cards, by the way, retail for $215 in Garmin’s regular sizes, and $321 in large sizes. And speaking more generally of chart data sources I was interested to see this list of hydrographic offices including what Garmin has signed up for.)