navigating with 310xt

If I remember right, you select the course and press enter. It will ask if you want to do the course, select yes and press start. I think that it beeps to let you know of an upcoming turn, but as far as seeing a street level map, no it doesn't do that.

I will let you know tonight, I am going to pre-ride the bike course for Kansas City Triathlon today and try to use the course mode to "navigate" the course.

i have yet to explore the detailed directions option.  however, i did upload a route and had a general idea of where i was going.  When i missed a turned it told me I was off course.  when i doubled back and made the turn it responded found course. 

I assume that if i would have uploaded the route and kept it on the initial screen it would notify me of upcoming turns.  but i toggled over to my data screens. 

The 310 will only show a "bread crumb" trail of your course.  You need to figure out when to turn by following the map visually.  It will beep and give a message when you are off course, but will not give you a "turn in 500 yards" warning.

To a degree you can with the 310XT.

Within GTC you can add given course icons and a brief one-line description, which allows you (with enough patience) to actually build out more detailed instructions.

I explained this a bit in the comments section on a post I did recently on creating routes for the Garmin Forerunner's and Edge's.

thanks rainmaker.  this is nice.

i was really excited about a ride this weekend, and even got it uploaded to the watch but it didn't help much since it didn't tell me the turns so i got lost. 

Yeah, the 705 is really the ideal device in this arean, but completely agree that I wish the 305/310/500 did a better job here out of the box.  The ironic thing is that the devices have the functionality to do it - it's just that the software tied into it pretty much sucks, making it pretty painful to do frequently.  I do suspect we'll see some changes here in the near future from 3rd parties though supporting this featureset better.  We're already seeing that from a few companies, so it's only a matter of time.