Magellan Maestro 4350
We have used a TomTom 300 since 2006. We are not sure if the Magellan 4350 is "good", or "excellent", because it has a steep learning curve, which we are far from mastering.
The screen is big, but, like the TomTom, hard to see in daylight. The instructions are clear and generally easy to follow, but voice quality can be a problem--the TomTom was clearer. I think it is slower than my TomTom to find sattelites, but am not sure.
As long term AAA members, we wanted the AAA points of interest, and they are great. Customer service seems good, too--better than Tom Tom's. We have yet to try the traffic information feature.
Keeping in mind that we have not yet traversed the learning curve, here are minor irritations:
1. Screen freezes on rare occasions, requiring a hard boot. A real problem when it happens in heavy traffic on a complicated route, especially if there is no passenger to do the hard boot.
2. Voice quality medium to poor--sometimes difficult to understand. (We have not tried using it with FM, however.)
3. Screen does not show distance to intermediate destinations. On long trip to DC, we told GPS to stop at a hotel en route. Screen showed distance to DC, and we did not know how close we were to hotel. Called customer service, and was told to go to list of directions and add miles to intermediate destination. (E.g 15 mi. to Highway, 62 mi. to exit 49, 12 mi. along route 10, 4 mi, to Smith Rd., 6 mi. to hotel) We found it easier to list the hotel as a final destination and put in a new final destination the next morning.
4. Difficult to plan a trip on the map; hard to manipulate the screen.
5. Huge, but incomplete list, of points of interests categories. For example, we wanted to find seafood restaurants on Cape Cod. Points of interest has huge number of categories by type of food (e.g., German, Dutch) and by chain (e.g., Dunkin Donuts, Outback), but no listing for "seafood" or even "fish". If we asked the GPS for nearby restaurants and looked at the descriptions, it would tell us if one or another was a seafood restaurant. But there was no grouping of them. I had the impression that some engineer was focusing on numbers of categories rather than usefulness of categories.
6. No place on the GPS to hold a stylus. But a stylus is very useful using it, and manual so indicates.
7. Some gimmicks seem silly. The ability to see buildings, for example, works too sporadically to be useful, and is very hard to make sense of when it does work. I hate to think I paid extra for it.
8. Some weird routes. If, going home, I turn onto my street 8 blocks from my house, GPS rebels and has me do a left, a right, go six blocks, a right and a left. All streets are completely straight according to the map and form a grid, so there are no curves that might make the detour make sense. If I turn onto my street seven blocks from home, it sends me down my street. I cannot account for the detour. I cannot tell how often this happens because I usually assume the route I am given is the best--this is one of the few times I know it was silly. But then again, the TomTom sometimes led me into dead ends, or into loops that went nowhere.
Again, these irritations are minor. I lke the Magellan, and make heavy use of the AAA material.Read full review
