Posted by gps_units on
February 20, 2010
Long 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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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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Posted by gps_units on
January 9, 2010
this product had a big splotch on the screen. the company will not respond so I can return the item. Not happy,
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Posted by gps_units on
November 10, 2009
If you’re like me and aren’t into a lot of bells and whistles, this is a great little GPS unit. I was a little skeptical because of the price, but a friend of mine has a Magellan (a higher unit) and loves it. Right out of the box, it was easy to set up and get going. It’s very intuitive to use. So far, I haven’t been directed to drive into the middle of a lake like one of our units from another GPS company did. The only negative thing I have found is that once in a while the unit “freezes” when you power up if you haven’t used it for a few days and you have to run a test on the screen to get it unstuck. It’s probably something boneheaded I’m doing when I turn it off and not the unit’s fault.
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Posted by gps_units on
November 4, 2009
I have had this unit for over 2 years now. I works pretty well once it acquires the satellite signal. It takes about 1-4 minutes to lock on satellites.
I have had trouble with the power cradle as DC in pin somehow got bend and is now broken. It costs $70 for a new cradle, so I decided to get a DC jack and solder it. It seems I am not the only one with this problem, search google.
Would I buy this specific model again? No. Simply because their are newer, better and cheaper gps sets available now.
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Posted by gps_units on
September 25, 2009
This 4700 is my 4th Magellan. The first was a 750 which was the same as the Hertz ‘Never Lost’. Worked great but when the 860T hit the market I had to have it. One year ago I bought a 3250 for another car, a little “funky” but it gets me where I need to go.
Last week my old reliable 860 was unfortunately stolen from my car. So since I have had good luck with Magellan I started to look for a new GPS. First I purchased a RoadMate 1340 which looked good in the box but had a display that was unreadable in daylight; any daylight. Returned the 1340 and then purchased a Maestro 4700… then the fun began.
Positives: Nice display… AAA Tour Book… Clear and loud voice… mostly (not always accurate)… Ability to do multi-location routing… Basic voice commands… Bluetooth & Traffic neither of which I have used.
NEGATIVES: Constant RESTARTS: When certain locations are requested. The display reads “YOUR DEVICE NEEDS TO BE RESTARTED TO INCREASE PERFORMANCE, PLEASE WAIT WHILE YOUR DATA IS SAVED. And then the unit turns off and restarts. I have spoken with Magellan support several times in the past week and, at first, they claimed that they have had no problems before. Today they said that I should return the unit for repair. For example: I live in Connecticut and often drive to Florida, when I put in ANY address in Florida the unit restarts. This is also true for many cities in Georgia and South Carolina. If you need to go to Mobile, Alabama however no problem.
The in-putting of locations is done by Town or City not by State; so if you want to go to San Francisco and type that in you get to choose from every town in Mexico that has San Francisco in the name.
For the most part it works locally BUT, from Connecticut, you CAN NOT go to ANY city or town in Florida, as well as many cities in Georgia and South Carolina. The same error message: YOUR DEVICE NEEDS etc. appears and you can’t navigate to your destination! Therefore this GPS is useless for me the way it works today.
In time I believe that Magellan will get the 4700 ‘right’, at least I hope so. When and if Magellan fixes this fatal problem I will change my rating to 5 stars, until then I will not go South of the Mason Dixon Line.Magellan Maestro 4700 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator
HOPEFULLY THINGS WILL GET BETTER Added August 16, 2009
And now for some history:
The checkered history of the Magellan corporation, as we know it today, may have contributed to some of the issues that have been illuminated in this and other forums. Since my first experience with Magellan labeled products was positive, I tried to stay with a known entity. In the early 1980’s I bought a Magellan Loran C for marine use. It ALWAYS worked providing me with accurate TD’s and, with the Loran C overprinted charts got me to my waypoints and destinations. BTW Loran was developed by the Military as Loran A during WW II.
While GPS was not developed until the late 1970’s and early 1980’s it was not available for commercial use until the mid 1980’s. All through this period Magellan, or as it was previously known as Navistar, was in the forefront of navigation product development. Later, a number of Silicon Valley companies were involved with or owned Magellan. In 2001 Thales, a French based Fortune 500 communications and defense company acquired Magellan and tried/did change Magellan’s name to Thales Navigation; not a household name.
Five years later, in 2006, Thales sold Thales Navigation to an Investment group named Shah Capital Partners which changed the name back to Magellan. Recently, in January of this year, Magellan was acquired by MiTAC, a Taiwan based company that is, along with other products, in the GPS business. MiTAC owns Mio and NAVMAN and now Magellan. To me, it looks like MiTAC is committed to the GPS marketplace.
From the foregoing, one might see that while Magellan had some less than satisfying marriages in recent times, its beginnings were superb.
Now we have an industry (popular priced GPS devices) that brings out new products every few months just to keep up with the competition. Often these products are released; “not ready for prime time”. Virtually all of the companies in this arena (Magellan included), have to recall or upgrade or `ship’ updated firmware or hardware. Even the industry leader (by units shipped) Garmin/Nuvi have had their share of problems. What is critical to the success of these companies, in my opinion, is the manner in which Customer Service is addressed. Starting with the contracted, offshore-based telephone and e-mail support, without an escalation plan to the refusal to acknowledge that a problem is not a one off.
I, for one, am encouraged that Magellan is now owned by MiTAC. I like my new Maestro 4700, warts and all, and in time hope to love it when it works as well as my stolen 860t did. For now I will do `workarounds’.
That’s my opinion, I could be wrong.
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Posted by gps_units on
September 7, 2009
Better, smaller, more versatile and much less expensive than the mount that comes with the Magellan GPS devices. The original part that came with mine didn’t work at all, Magellan did not answer my service inquiry, and Magellan’s part costs $45.
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