And I agree with Kim’s comments.
In defence of the eTrex 20, the hardware is pretty impressive for the money. It feels more like a professional tool than a gadget. The battery door closes like a submarine hatch. The rubber armour is nice. With eneloops, the battery life is longer than the already long claim – as opposed to the Edges that miss their specifications when new, never mind after a couple of hundred cycles on the built-in li-ion battery. And, best of all, the eTrex 20 display has much higher contrast than the Edges in bright light, especially with the backlights off. I had many near-crashes while struggling to see the map on my Edge 800 on overcast days.
The Edges have a habit of losing data. They have a variety of ways of doing this. Mine have lost tracks or parts of tracks at café stops. Other times they’ve shut down randomly. Other times they’ve shut down at a specific point on a route (every time), whether because of electromagnetic radiation or another software bug I don’t know. And when they shut down, getting them to pick up the route again is not always trivial. Other times, old rides have disappeared from the history.
Garmin has been almost unbelievably poor at fixing these bugs with software updates, instead often introducing new bugs or even new models with the same bugs. Honestly, someone should be in jail over this.
The eTrex 20 is a lot more reliable at showing you where to go and recording a track, and that’s important because it’s pretty much the whole point of these things (unless you’re a Strava metrics nerd). Mind you, the eTrex 20 rattles in its mount and sometimes shuts down on hard bumps, likely because the AA cells momentarily disconnect. Solving that is my next challenge.
The eTrex 30 (or 30x) has an altimeter and compass, the first of which I miss on my eTrex 20. However, when I bought mine there were, you guessed it, software bugs with the eTrex 30’s altimeter and compass. I didn’t trust Garmin to fix those, though I think they actually did in this instance. Perhaps someone here remembers details.