Personalize OneTouch search icons with your favorite places
Announces street names and directions at each turn Text To Speech
Features a portable 3.5-Inch color touch screen
QuickSpell with Smart City search narrows your address and city entries
Permits multi-destination routing
This review is from: Magellan RoadMate 1220 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Competition is good and I am happy to see another respectful contender in the GPS navigation arena. But competition is competition, so for the purpose of this review I have borrowed my wife's Garmin Nuvi and ignoring other drivers raced eyebrows, drove around for several weeks with two GPS navigators.First, what I really like about RoadMate: - it is small and slick and fits into my shirt pocket- it has three hours of battery life- it has fast and very well organized user interface- its address input feature is just great; in general I am able to enter a destination address in RoadMate two times faster than in Garmin. - RoadMate shows exit services and has lot of useful location-sensitive information only a touch away- it has a pretty loud speaker- it finds satellites faster than Garmin and loses them less frequently- when building the route, it allows you to select several travel options for that route (fastest, shortest, most highways) - it understand multiple intermediate points and optimize the route among themNow, things I am not particularly fond of:- the screen is two times dimmer than Garmin's screen, but still perfectly usable- it takes RoadMate 35 seconds to start up (Garmin's startup time is 20 secs)- it never bother informing the driver when it lost satellite reception, conveniently freezing the display with no further directions- it never informs the driver about missing a turn, recalculating the route in silence (now I appreciate Garmin's "recalculating" message)- the map has bugs and is not yet upgradeable (I hope this is temporary)- no maps for countries other than USA and Mexico are available (I hope this is temporary too)- the so called 3D map is hardly 3D and has limited zoom capabilities- the text to speech system suffers from chronic tonsillitis and is sometimes difficult to understand Now for real problems:It is sad when an almost perfect design is nearly destroyed by two drawbacks. Each problem may be relatively minor, but their combined effect is disastrous.The first small, annoying bug: when the unit zooms into the map at an intersection, it never returns back to the original zoom. This means that after the first turn you get maximum zoom and unless you adjust it manually while driving, you have no clue as to what lies ahead. This problem alone could be OK if not for numerous bugs in voice prompts. This is the part where improvements are overdue.RoadMate voice guidelines software is way behind the competition. It may tell you to "stay on the current road" several times and then suddenly tell you to take exit. It may bother you with multiple advices to "stay on the current road" without any visible reason. At the fork it may or may not tell you whether to keep left or right. It may prompt you to take a "slight turn" just because road bends but sometimes it really means a turn. Even worse - if right exit happens to bend to the left, the unit sometimes tells you to take a "slight left turn". To be frank, voice prompts are usually correct, but bugs mentioned above are too often. In the end I just want to see the next turn at the unit's screen.It all boils down to the simple question - would you turn your attention to the road and rely on buggy instructions or start adjusting zoom level at 3.5 inch GPS screen?In comparison, Garmin unfailingly starts prompting you for any turn enough in advance to let you make any necessary changes, and keeps reminding you of the turn. It almost never makes mistakes in voice instructions. It always tells you whether to keep left or right. Also, Garmin always zooms out to show the next turn (unless the next turn is a few hundred miles away). Well, RoadMate is not a terrible GPS system, but in light of other choices, I would not necessarily recommend this one. ...
This review is from: Magellan RoadMate 1220 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I HATE my husband's GPS (different brand). It's complicated; the last couple of times I've invited Suzy (that's her name) along for the ride, she was still insisting I make a U-turn as I was pulling into my destination--and she still thinks we live on the opposite side of the street. To be honest, Suzy is rather high maintenance and not very smart but my husband is inexplicably infatuated. So enamored is he in fact that I caved in to pressure and grudgingly agreed that yeah, I probably needed a GPS of my own, though my private resolution was to never turn it on. ...
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