Posted by gps_units on
January 28, 2010
Having owned, used, and been extremely pleased with the eTrex Vista C for a number of years, I was a bit disturbed by needing to purchase a new upgraded unit to take advantage of maps of New Zealand (live in USA). However, I was totally surprised by features advertised, but irrelevant to my upgrade purchase: the Vista HCx’s dramatically improved sensitivity and seemingly resultant improved accuracy. I went heli-skiing in New Zealand with the HCx zipped up in a pocket of my ski jacket to record my tracks. Track accuracy for my skiing as displayed on Google Earth was phenomenal, much better than anything I had seen with my Vista C. Using the old Vista C inside a vehicle, I had to keep the unit on the dash with a view of the sky through the windshield to maintain lock on the satellites and hence my location and track. The Vista HCx maintains track with good accuracy continuously sitting on the lap of a passenger inside a vehicle. This helps tremendously when you need a passenger to help with navigation in a city with which you are not familiar (both the Vista HCx and Vista C can be used for city navigation, but they are optimized operationally for trail use).
So, if you have been happy with the Vista C, and it is a few years old, you probably will find an upgrade to the Vista HCx well worth it, especially with the prices you can get through Amazon. Any maps you had for the Vista C will work with the Vista HCx, and you can use all the NT (New Technology) maps now available and supported by Garmin. I have really enjoyed both the better sensitivity and increased storage (2 Gbytes on a micro-SD card - <$10 now) for maps with the HCx. Nothing appears to have changed operationally between the two units, so there is nothing new to learn to use the new HCx. Interestingly however, the software seems to have improved in efficiency. An upgrade that is worth it.
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Posted by gps_units on
January 25, 2010
This Magellan GPS is not a bad GPS. Indeed, for someone who has never used a GPS before, this might be a pleasant experience. But for the past two or three years, I have used a Garmin GPS. And compared to the Garmin, the Magellan is an exercise in frustration.
Let’s just start from the beginning.
Satellite connection:
This thing took an inordinate amount of time to connect to the satellite signals when I first started it up. I don’t know if this is because it was searching the entire world for the correct satellites, or what, but all the Garmin GPS devices I have used ask you to input your initial position manually, probably so that it doesn’t have to go searching the entire sky to figure out which satellites to use and where you are. It took so long to connect, in fact, that I thought I had received a faulty unit.
On subsequent startups, the connection was much quicker, but still not as fast as my two-year-old Garmin.
Entering addresses:
Typing in your destination address is a bad experience. Why? Well, as you type each letter, the Magellan tries to figure out which street you are talking about. This is fine, but as soon as it figures out — or thinks it figures out — what street you probably mean, it jumps to a screen of street name suggestions. This would be fine if it paused briefly before accepting new input. But it doesn’t, and so fast typists like me will inevitably choose a street or city without seeing what we have selected, because we are still typing the name. Then you have to go back and start again.
In comparison, the Garmin throws in a slight one second delay before allowing you to choose the intended street name from its list of suggestions. This prevents any accidental input.
Navigation:
Okay, this is a big one. The Magellan’s navigation algorithms are, for want of a better word, funky. I had the machine set to give me the fastest, rather than the shortest, route. However, its alleged fastest route is almost never the actual fastest route. This is a huge problem, essentially negating one of the main benefits of a GPS. I know how to get to a lot of places around town in a roundabout way, but presumably a GPS is able to calculate the most direct route. However, as I entered in destinations into the Magellan, I was shocked and annoyed to find that its fastest route was always several minutes longer than the Garmin’s fastest route. (For comparison’s sake, I was often using the Magellan and the Garmin at the same time.)
The Garmin always knew what it was doing. When I entered in an address across town, the Garmin usually told me to take the freeway (specifically, I 66), and would give me its estimated time of arrival. The Magellan, however, wanted me to take an odd, non-freeway route, with an estimated time of arrival of several minutes longer than the Garmin’s calculation. I double-checked the Magellan’s settings to make sure that freeways were enabled, and indeed they were. For some reason, the Magellan simply wasn’t using them. When I decided to take the Garmin’s advice, the Magellan eventually recalculated the route, and now that it was on the freeway, it gave me an updated time of arrival — several minutes shorter than its original so-called fastest time.
The Magellan’s fastest time calculations are simply wrong. I know this not just from my experimental observations, but also because it has a neat feature where you can see a screen listing the estimated time of arrival using its various different navigation settings: fastest time, shortest route, etc. Frequently, it’s “fastest time” was actually longer than the rest of the navigation options. This makes absolutely no sense and is indicative of a bug in the navigation algorithms.
Voice guidance:
Had I never used a Garmin GPS, I would have thought the Magellan’s voice guidance was perfectly adequate. However, with the Magellan and the Garmin sitting next to each other, both trying to explain what to do next, the differences — and the shortcomings of the Magellan — were obvious. The Magellan’s computerized voice was stilted, and nowhere as natural sounding as the Garmin. The Magellan would say something like, “Right Turn, Point Five Miles, Harrison Street.” The Garmin would say, “In Point Five Miles, Turn Right on Harrison Street.”
Voice guidance on freeways was even worse, a crying shame considering the high speeds at which one drives on the freeway. You should not have to use any brainpower to decipher what the GPS is trying to tell you, and yet the Magellan required some concentration and decoding. It would bombard you with various route and exit numbers, giving you far more information than you need to take the next exit, and rattling off that information without natural pauses. It was frustrating.
Freeway navigation theoretically should have been made more pleasing than the Garmin by the addition of Magellan’s interesting sounding Exit Sign Technology. This feature allows you to display the various green freeway signs on the screen of your Magellan, highlighting the sign that you want to follow. This is supposed to be easier than just listening to the voice telling you which exit to take. But it really just adds confusion, as I have to stare at the different reproduced signs, (which are not actual pictures of the real highway signs, by the way, but just generic green highway signs that usually look nothing like the real signs), and try to figure out what it wants me to do. Again, this just requires more brainpower and makes it more likely that I will get confused at 80 mph and miss an exit.
And the Magellan’s timing was off. Timing on a GPS is a very subtle, yet important feature. The GPS has to be able to tell you when to turn at different times depending on what speed you are going, how far ahead the turn is, whether you’re going to need to switch lanes quickly to make the turn, etc. Garmin’s programmers got this right; Magellan’s didn’t. Again, this is something that I might not even have realized had I only been using the Magellan, and had I never used a Garmin. But, having had a successful GPS experience for years, the deficiencies in the Magellan’s voice and timing algorithms were evident.
Display:
The navigation display colors are horrible. I don’t know if the Magellan engineers had never used any other GPS devices, or did not focus group their display, but the colors they chose to delineate roads and routes are completely nonsensical. During the day, in order to indicate the routes to take, the Garmin highlights your suggested roads in a light yellowish green line, which is displayed over a slightly darker yellowish green background. At night, the color scheme is not much better. Now, my eyes are fine. I am in my late 20s and I can generally see things on a LCD monitor with no problem, and yet I had trouble seeing which roads were actually highlighted.
The Garmin gets this right. It overlays a bright pink line against a gray background during the day, and a dark blue background at night. This is much easier to see. There are never any questions over whether or not a road is actually highlighted. I always know where I’m supposed to go.
It is really ironic that the Magellan, which has an amazingly clear and bright LCD screen, would be so inferior in this area to my old clunky Garmin with its faded screen. But because of the questionable choice of colors, the Garmin crushes it.
Does the Magellan have any pros?
Sure. As I said, it has a beautiful screen. It is generally a fast machine (except for connecting to the satellite, sometimes). Its navigation interface, although cluttered, gives you quicker one touch access to destinations than the Garmin does. This is handy when on the highway, for instance — it takes two taps to see the list of nearest gas stations (Where to, Gas), compared to four taps on the Garmin (Menu, Where to, Food/Fuel/Etc., Gas Stations). The Garmin is less cluttered, but it takes longer to wade through its many submenus. Finally, the Magellan’s standard closing phrase (”You have ARRIVED!”) sounds far cooler than the Garmin’s ho-hum “Now arriving.”
Bottom line:
My two-year-old Garmin GPS is a far superior device to this brand-new Magellan. Had I never known the Garmin, I would be satisfied with the Magellan. But I know what a GPS device is capable of. I simply cannot use the Magellan because it is incredibly frustrating and gets a lot of things, most notably navigation calculations, very wrong.
My advice? Look at Amazon’s list of best selling GPS devices. The crowd is rarely wrong, and in this case the crowd and I both agree: If you want to get somewhere, Garmin is the way to go.
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