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Posted by gps_units on February 20, 2010Long review but here is the SUMMARY: If this is your first GPS, you may be excited with all the features it claims, but for Magellan 32xx/42xx series users, this is a ‘practical’ downgrade.
I own a Magellan 3250 GPS for last 2 years and I was looking for an upgrade. With some nice bells and whistles - lane assist, speed warning, audio player, FM Transmitter etc, Magellan 4350 seemed to be a nice upgrade. And it was being offered at a very good price. I bought it for $153 from Radioshack. Naturally the first thing I did was to compare it against my old Magellan 3250. The GPS unit came with some preloaded SW and it needed to be upgraded to enable few features like ‘vehicle speed’ and the usual Magellan Ding sound. Here is my summary with the latest SW (as of Aug 2009) - 4350 with Aug SW Vs 3250 (2007 Maps & 2009 SW)
Advantages (4350)
- wide screen
- faster recalculation. If I miss a turn, 4350 recalculates route in half of the time as compared to 3250. Compared head to head
- Lane Assist - works well. I live in Portland metro area and on most of the US-26 exits it popped up the Lane assist window. It works well. this is not Junction view. This is only lane assist. It simulates the sign boards on the road
- Auto zoom is cool though it is not a big deal.
- It shows the speed of the vehicle on the main screen in routing mode. In routing mode, Magellan 3250 shows speed on Where am I screen And in non-routing mode, magellan 3250 shows vehicle speed on the main screen.
- Trip simulation is great.
- Multiple routing options are pretty good.
- POI search is very fast and has better database / results than 3250. My 3250 uses 2007 Maps/database.
Disadvantages (4350)
- Ding is very unreliable. Latest SW Enables it. But it is unreliable. Most of the times, you hear it 50 ft before the turn. Sometimes you hear it right at the turn. And sometimes during the process of taking turn (especially on ‘long’ left turns). That is insane.
- Comes with male and female sound options. But the sound is pretty poor quality. A shallowish sound and doesn’t pronounce some simple words correctly, though it gets the point across.
- Very hard to look at the screen during average day light, even if the sun is not directly falling on it. The contrast (foreground vs background) is kind of weird.
- MP3 player is OK-OK when the audio is routed to the mono-speaker of the GPS.
- FM Transmitter - poor quality. This is not usable. This is OK for routing the GPS directions to car audio, but not for routing mp3 audio. My Honda Accord had pretty bad audio on FM (all available frequencies). I have a $18 Coby FM Transmitter which delivers near CD quality static-free audio in the same car on same frequencies.
- Magellan has tried to make routing directions (audio) different, but I guess in that process, they messed it up. It says - ‘take right on street XYZ’, then it says ‘take the 2nd right’, then it says ‘take the next right’. So, it doesn’t truly speak street names everytime. In a sparsely populated area at 35mph, it told me ‘take the 2nd right’ well after it had already passed that turn and I was expected to take the next right rather than the 2nd right. I am wondering how it will route in crowded and congested downtown areas where intersections may be very close to eachother. This was a real deal braker.
- One of the most weird things - On Freeway entrances, it says the same lousy sentence: “Take the next right” as compared to Magellan 3250 that says: “Entering Freeway entrance on the right on USXX-East”. That is pretty lame and lousy.
- Satellite acquiring is unreliable. When it acquires, it is faster than 3250. But sometimes it takes 2-3 min in open areas and it needs a power-off/-on cycle to acquire the satellite. Weird.
- Bluetooth - It paired with my two Blackberries (8310 & 8820) effortlessly. But weird that when it receives a call, it doesn’t display the caller-ID. it displays ‘unknown number’. Amazing! I am not talking about caller’s name, I am talking about the number. My magellan 3250 displays the caller ID (not the name). May be we need to pay $6 per month to enable Caller-ID like we pay to Verizon for caller-ID:)
- Speed warning: It does pop-up on highways. For example, on US-26 it did pop-up pretty reliably. But on the freeway which has speed limit of 55mph, it showed 50mph throughout the freeway. Magellan 4350 was launched in Oct 2008. I know this highway has the same speed limit for last 2 years (at least). So it doesn’t make sense.
- It doesn’t tell you which street you are ON. It tells that only if you are not in routing mode. But that is insane. In routing mode, it only shows which lane you need to turn on. After all that wide screen, they didn’t find enough space to fit that info. 3250 has this.
- It doesn’t tell you whether you are heading, N, S, E or W. Magellan 3250 has this. Oops, this was supposed to be a GPS!!
- It doesn’t tell you the speed of the vehicle unless you are in routing mode. Very weird.
Because of all these disadvantages (downgrades from 3250), I returned it in 2 days and decided to live with my 3250.
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