Garmin eTrex Touch 35 Review

You might not think that you really need a hand-held GPS in this day and age where your smartphone is everything from your music library to your own GPS unit but think again. Hiking in true wilderness provides you with some serious challenges, navigation being one of them, and your smartphone is simply not going to cut it out there.

You need something reliable, rugged, waterproof, that gives you pinpoint accuracy and won’t run out of battery, you need a hand-held GPS. Today we take a look at the Garmin eTrex Touch 35. This is unit is the top end of the eTrex series and is the only one with a touch screen.

The eTrex 35T is light, compact, durable, and incredibly accurate and it could be the GPS you and your trail have been looking for. Below we strip it down and look in detail at its design, navigation, usability, accuracy, and more. Have a read to find out why the Garmin eTrex Touch 35 might be the hand-held GPS you have been waiting for.

Design & Durability

The Garmin eTrex Touch 35 will slip into your pocket without you even knowing. The unit has dimensions of  2.3 x 4.0 x 1.3 inches and weighs just 5.6 ounces. It’s actually one of the lightest touch screen GPS’ around. This means you can keep it handy at all times, either in the side pocket of your backpack, in hand, or in your pants pocket.

The GPS is surrounded by hard plastic with ergonomic grips on the sides so it stays in your hand. It’s a pretty robust unit and can handle a few knocks, but it is important to protect the touch screen. The casing is tight and protects the inner workings from dust, dirt, and humidity.

Waterproofing

eTrex Touch 35 is waterproofed to IPX7 standards. This means it can be submerged for 30 minutes at a depth of 1 meter before things start going wrong. You can use it in the rain and get it wet by mistake without having to worry.

Display Quality

The display is 2.6 inches and has 160 x 240 pixels that give immense clarity even at distance. You’ll be able to see everything in as much detail as you need. It does a pretty good job at being readable in sunlight and it will automatically dim after you don’t use it for a while to save battery.

Battery Life

The eTrex Touch 35 takes two AA batteries that last about 16 hours on average. Whilst this isn’t the longest battery life we have ever seen, the use of AA’s is incredibly convenient. They are inexpensive as batteries go, very available to buy in an emergency and it’s easy to carry spares along with you.

Usability

Versatility

The eTrex Touch 35 does a pretty good job at being a GPS multi-tool. You share from it to other compatible devices, use it as a remote for Garmin VIRB cameras and you can connect it to your smartphone to see your messages while you’re being active.

There are pre-set profiles that you can select once you turn the unit on whether you’re hiking, running, cycling, and more. It’s pretty good in terms of memory and you can store twice as many waypoints compared to the other eTrex GPS’.

Ease of Use

The eTrex Touch 35 is simple, easy, and intuitive to use. Just power up, choose your activity profile and you’ll be given a certain layout to get into the outdoors with. The touchscreen is pretty responsive and comes with two settings, sensitive and normal. The sensitive setting is ideal for use when wearing gloves and the normal setting is best for bare fingers.

The screen is a little small but it’s much easier to type on than using a joystick, like the other models.

Once you’re navigating it is pretty responsive to your touch and it constantly updates your heading as your location changes.

Navigation

The eTrex touch 35 comes preloaded with a global base map and your choice of either topo US or topo Canada. This means you can get outdoors immediately on receipt of the GPS and begin finding new areas to explore.

You can pre-plan routes using Garmin’s Basecamp software and transfer them over with ease to your saved routes on your GPS. You can save up to 200 routes and 10,000 waypoints on this unit.

GPS and GLONASS

The eTrex Touch 35 utilizes both GPS and GLONASS satellite networks to give you better coverage and to help find your location quickly. It’s pretty good and finding you and it once it connects to your position, follows you very accurately.

GPS HotFix

The eTrex Touch 35 uses its HotFix feature to lock on to your location as fast as possible. HotFix works by predicting your location based on where you spend the most time to find you quickly. This does mean if you go somewhere new and far away, it may take it longer than usual to lock on to your position.

WAAS

If you’re in North America, you’ll also get the benefit of the WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) feature. This helps the eTrex Touch 35 correct its signal and therefore accuracy by using satellites and ground stations and ends up giving you a 3m accuracy 95% of the time.

Geocaching

The eTrex Touch 35 comes preloaded with 250,000 geocaches from the Geocaching website. It stores all the key information for your treasure hunt and serves up location, terrain, descriptions, hints, difficulty, and more. Gone are the days of manually entering coordinates and using paper printouts.

You can also upload other GPX files to your unit to increase your geocache library but we don’t think you’ll need to do that for a while.

Other Features

The eTrex Touch 35 comes with some really useful additions features, the most useful of which we will discuss below.

Digital Compass

It comes with a 3-axis tilt-compensated electronic compass that shows your heading even when you’re standing still. It gives you some serious accuracy and you’ll always be able to find your bearing no matter where you are. 

Altimeter

The altimeter works to give you a 3D positional helping you to figure out your exact location. It works by measuring the air pressure around you to give you your approximate altitude.

You can also use the barometric sensor to predict changes in the weather when sudden pressure changes come along. This is a really useful feature that can tell you about freak storms coming in giving you enough time to find some sort of shelter.

Value For Money

While this one of the most expensive units in the eTrex series, it is still a pretty good value touchscreen. You could opt to not have a touchscreen and go for the 30x to save some money, as they are similar units under the hood. But if it’s a touch screen you’re after, this is one of the cheapest around.

Rating

The eTrex Touch 35 scored well on our rating system with a score of 90. It lost most of its points in the value for money section as you can get the same unit without the touch screen for quite a bit less cash.

But if you want a touch screen unit, you’re always going to have to pay a little more for the technology. Outside of this, the Touch 35 did really well in all the categories.

Verdict

The eTrex Touch 35 is a bridge between two worlds of a basic button hand-held and a more sophisticated touchscreen. That being said, it is light, durable, effective, nice to use, and does the job it’s intended for.

If you’re looking for a small and basic GPS and can’t live without a touchscreen, then it is an awesome choice.