Touchscreen Vs Non-Touchscreen Garmins
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    19 years
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I was shopping at Eden Prairie Center today in Minnesota. There is a Scheels store in there and I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had some Garmin devices on display and powered up. (I rarely see that at other stores I frequent these days.) One of them was the Garmin GPSMAP 67 it was released almost 3 years ago.
I was impressed that is was receiving signals from a number of satellites despite being inside a shopping center. I did switch it from GPS Only to Multi-GNSS and received signals from even more satellites.
My other big takeaway is I am so accustomed to using touchscreen displays on my Garmins, Android/Apple smartphones, tablets and laptop computers that using a non-touchscreen device seems like a step backwards to me. However, I suspect that non-touchscreen devices are more durable than touchscreen devices.
The first Garmin that I owned was a StreetPilot 2730. It had a touchscreen, but it also had four physical buttons to the right of the touchscreen for FIND, MENU, MAP and SPEAK. It also came with a remote control and I never used that.
The other thing I remember about that model was the loudspeaker. It was built into the power cord! There was also an external speaker jack and an FM transmitter to send a low powered signal to your vehicle FM stereo radio.
Best of both worlds
In my opinion, a combination of both touch screen and buttons would be the most ideal. You can use one method solely by itself or a combination of both. The new GPSMAP H1 (supposedly, the H stands for "Hybrid" or both touch and/or button input) does this but I wouldn't "touch" that device with a ten-foot pole due to all of its issues (just like the eTrex Touch).
My Garmin Quest also came with a speaker built into the power cord (it swiveled at the 12v lighter plug to be able to aim it more towards you). That Quest screen was tiny but back then, my eyes were a lot better. The buttons did beep when pressed and had the typical Garmin sounds through it's built-in speaker (just like most other Garmins). The speaker in the power cable was used for the spoken turn-by-turn navigation sounds.
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