"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them"

"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them," said Dan Bartel, Garmin's vice president of worldwide sales. "Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 provide a bridge between the slimmed-down Dakota™ family and the top-of-line Oregon 550t, all of which work seamlessly with Garmin Custom Maps in planning your adventure and Garmin Connect for reliving the experience and sharing the memories."

Responsive to the touch of a finger, yet resistant to the rigors of nature, Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 simplify navigation through a glove-friendly touchscreen interface. This bright 3" color display is easier than ever to read and use in all conditions. Other key upgrades include user-selectable dashboards, enhanced track navigation, high-speed USB for faster map transfers with your computer, photo navigation and the 3-axis tilt-compensated electronic compass, which shows your heading even when you're standing still, without the need to hold it level. The new dashboards give users the ability to customize the appearance of various pages on your Oregon, including the geocaching, compass, stopwatch and elevation functions. For hikers, cyclists and trail runners, the enhanced track navigation will prove especially useful. When navigating to a destination on an active track, users will see the changes in elevation ahead of them as well as where they've been. Also, waypoints and other key locations along the active route – such as start, end and high and low elevation points – now appear on the map and active route pages. The new Oregon units also include a barometric altimeter, paperless geocaching and wireless exchange of tracks, waypoints, routes and geocaches with compatible Oregon, Dakota, Colorado® and Foretrex® devices.

Both units boast a worldwide shaded relief basemap, and Oregon 450t adds preloaded 100K topographic maps for the entire United States and state-of-the-art 3D elevation perspective. Coverage on the 450t includes major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas. In addition, you can search for points of interest by name or proximity to your location and view descriptive details for terrain contours, topo elevations, summits and geographical points.

Customizing maps for your Garmin outdoor handheld – and downloading your activity afterward - were never easier. Through a few simple steps, Garmin's Custom Maps can bring the details, labels and landmarks of your existing paper or electronic map to a compatible Garmin Oregon, Dakota or Colorado. Compatible with both PC and Mac, this free utility complements the myriad of mapping products already offered for Garmin devices, including City Navigator®, NT for turn-by-turn directions on city streets, Blue Chart® g2, for marine charting, and TOPO U.S. 24K and 100K map software for incredible terrain detail (each sold separately). The power of Custom Maps is exemplified through paper and digital maps labeled for specific events and purposes, such as a college graduation invitation that lists campus buildings; a roadmap of a parade, marathon, 5K or bike race; a park pamphlet showing trailheads; land-management maps of wildlife and game areas; or a historic illustration of an area as it once stood. To walk through the steps, to find and share maps and to join discussions about Garmin Custom Maps, visit www.garmin.com/CustomMaps.

Experiences will live on long after the activity has ended, thanks to Garmin Connect's newly announced compatibility with Garmin outdoor handhelds, adding an expansive new product line to the free-to-join online community of more than 17 million activities – with more than 38,000 new activities per day – for sharing, storing, analyzing and enjoying. Outdoor and fitness enthusiasts alike can share activities on Facebook and Twitter, export to Google Earth or relive the activity in table view, calendar view or on a variety of maps including our new embedded Google Earth view.