Do not buy this gps unit (or anything else from Magellan)

I am entirely dissatisfied with my (brief) experience as an owner of a Magellan Explorist 400.

First, the user manuals sent with the Explorist 400 and the accompanying MapSend Topo Canada software are inadequate. The user manuals are short, uninformative, and out of date. The last-minute flyers stuck in the box telling me to be careful how I attached things together or I would "permanently destroy my GPS unit" were not helpful. If the issue of connection order is so important, why not add a labeled diagram to the warning so that we can be sure to perform it correctly - or better yet, include the warning on the first page of the user's manual!

I was willing to forgive all of these issues in return for a product which functioned properly and allowed me to conduct my work. However, two weeks into using the unit a major malfunction occurred which no one at Magellan technical support could explain to me. Immediately after pressing the 'mark' button while trying to mark a POI, the message "Warning: Save Error" appeared, with a message at the bottom indicating that I should press OK. I pressed OK, and then every single one of my 139 POIs disappeared. These POIs represented two weeks of work marking sites for a scientific research project.

The first person I spoke to at Magellan technical support told that I had cleared the memory and that it was my fault for pressing OK. He suggested that if I had pressed ESC instead, then the POIs would not have disappeared. If that is the case, I find it completely ridiculous that there was no indication in the warning message that pressing OK would delete all POIs. Surely a major function such as clearing the memory should not be able to be accidentally achieved without some message such as "Are you sure you want to delete all of your POIs?". If pressing OK after a message saying "Warning: Save Error OK" deletes all saved POIs, then the Explorist 400 is a very poorly designed piece of equipment. After I asked to speak to a supervisor so that I could register a complaint, the support person hung up on me.

I called Customer Support to begin the return process for my Explorist 400. I received a return authorization but was told that if the company was going to refund my freight charges I needed to get a senior technician to admit that the unit was faulty. The woman I spoke to told me that my issue had been sent forward as an accelerated request, but I have been waiting for two weeks and still have not received a call. My subsequent calls to the company have ended up in hours on hold and more (unfulfilled) promises that someone will call me back.

Based on my experiences I would strongly recommend that you not buy this unit, or anything else from Magellan.