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Electronics : Magellan Crossover 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Road and Trail Navigator |
- OK until it brokeThe good news is that the unit is small, portable, and has a decent battery life. The outdoor navigation feature (with very basic topo maps) seems to work, but the method of saving tracks is awkward (rather than naming your track first, you need to remember to name it and stop writing to it after your hike).
I use it mainly for vehicle navigation, and it works reasonably well. It does sometimes come up with non-optimal routes (compared to Google, or my own knowledge), and the maps seem to be quite out of date. It gives directions as if all roads are straight (not true in New England), and in many cases going "straight" means turning, and "turn left" means go straight (because the road turns right). It also comes up with arbritrary "go straight" messages on the highway. Entering addresses is tedious. One enters the city, then has a choice of all the states that the city occurs in - The idea that you are probably looking for close-by cities never occurred to anyone.
The bad news (for me at least) is that almost exactly to the day I brought it (so it's out of warranty), the power socket broke off. I opened it up (since according to the website I'm on my own for fixing it, and I can fix some things) and found that the power socket was top-mounted - I.E. the only thing holding it was a few blobs of solder - the lugs don't pass through the circuit board as they do for almost every electronic thing I've looked at. Basically I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. The customer service website is a joy. To obtain a return authorization, one enters info, and then is prompted for the same info again and again!
Rating:
- Magellan GPS gets lostAbout a year ago, I bought a Magellan Crossover to help my wife get around town (her sense of direction is 90%+ wrong, really quite amazing). I also wanted to use it for kayaking. I though I had found a great unit from a reputable company.
The facts:
The Magellan GPS gets lost. It frequently goes schizophrenic. The little pink line which indicates where to go is correct, but the directions on screen or issued verbally are wrong. The Magellan GPS has repeatedly announced I need to make a u-turn when the destination is just ahead and the GPS shows my correct position, and the little pink line indicates I should go straight ahead.
So, I assumed the firware needed updating. I went to the Magellan website. I tried to download the firmware. No luck. Contacted tech support. No help. I looked on epinions.com... I am not the only one that has had trouble with Magellan, and I'm quite experienced with computers, this was not a case of operator error.
I like way the Magellan GPS works, it has a nice set of features, lasts a long time on battery, and it has a pleasant voice, the GPS is suitably accurate... it just does not reliably give the right directions. The corporate support web site and tech support do not give the right directions either. This is a fatal flaw for this product.
It seems with Magellan and their products, you just can not get reliable directions.
Rating:
- Don't buyMagellan Customer service is the worst customer service I have ever dealt with. They offer a free 30 day map update since all of their products ship with out of date maps. This would be a good thing except it is in the fine print of their products and their customer support email address that their website list is the wrong address. I had to get through to their customer service by posting a bad review on their website. By the time they responded my unit was beyond the 30 day limit and they refused to give me the update. This is a bad business practice. Garmin has a 60 day guarantee which is posted directly on their website in plain view.
Rating:
- Finally a gps that does it both.I had been waiting for a unit that would assist me in finding addresses, giving me turn by turn directions and then be usable for geocaching. I thought this was the one. However, the two features are not so well integrated. Works like all others for navigating the roads. But if you want to navigate the roads to get close to a geocache and then find it offroads, you must program a POI for driving and then program a Waypoint to find it. Not easy if you want to set up about 10 or more of them. And then Magellan has its own format so you can't just download them from the internet into your box, you must hand enter. Might want to wait and see if Garman comes up with something. Oh, your current position icon is so big, that it gets in your way when your are trying to find stuff in a 10-12 ft radius. And the stinking "approaching destination" pop-up will screw ya up too, it clears the goto. If only we could hack the firmware and fix these things!
Rating:
- Didn't last longThe product got me from point A to point B, and worked well when traveling off the beaten trail while camping as well. Unfortunately, the product stopped picking up any signal about 6-7 months later. I never received a response from Magellan CS. The unit is now just a rather expensive paper weight.
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