6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Lots of Features, But Bad Routing
Date of Review: Jul 13, 2008
The Bottom Line: I'd avoid this unit. The main function of a GPS is routing, and if they don't have that right, what's the point?
I bought this for my wife, to upgrade her from an older base model Garmin unit (i3). After 30 days we ended up returning it. It is supposedly the top of the line 3" GPS from Magellan, so it did offer a lot of features.
The main reason for the return was poor routing. Within a mile of our house there were two places where the routing made no sense. One had you turn left, right, right, left, rather than just continuing on the road a block! One took you down a side street to turn left, rather than the main street, but if you took the main street it wouldn't recalculate to turn left when you reached the main street! And on top of that, although the device offered you four routing options, it didn't show you those options in advance, and only "most freeways" typically made any sense.
There were also some other annoyances. To enter an address, you had to enter the city or zip code first, rather than just searching for an address anywhere in the state. And the warnings to turn were not speed sensitive like the Garmin units, so you'd be warned two miles out to turn left, even if you were traveling through stoplights at a top speed of 30 mph. And I was never able to get the map to auto-zoom, so that it would zoom in as turns approached.
So as a GPS, the unit failed.
As to non-GPS features, the bluetooth feature seemed nice, but my wife didn't use it, so I can't comment much about that. Note that you need to manually connect your phone each time, which I think is good, but might annoy others.
The traffic feature was questionable. With AAA it is free for a year. But it was really difficult to tell what the traffic issues were, and it would reroute you far earlier than necessary (e.g. take you off the freeway to a parallel road 10 miles before a half mile backup).
The power cord was annoying, requiring two connections, one a mini-usb type and the other a 12 volt prong type. The latter is apparently for the traffic feature's antenna. I have no idea why they couldn't run that through the mini-USB, but having to connect two plugs each tome was somewhat annoying.
