Magellan Critique

Now that we’ve used our Magellan GPS for both local and cross country travel, I have a few criticisms that I feel I should mention:

• The voice is just annoying. I realize most GPS systems have annoying voices, but this one really bugs me.
• It gives really screwy directions sometimes. For example, we were heading from Santa Monica toward Pasadena, and wanted to start on the 405 and eventually end up on the 210. The fastest and shortest route is to take the 405 N to the 101 to the 134 to the 210. The Magellan instructed us to take the 405 N to the 405 N (I assume it meant the 5 N) and then to connect to the 210 near Sylmar, which basically would take us on a big loop around the valley and add a dozen traffic filled miles onto our trip. Yeah, that’s what we need during the afternoon commute.
• The “Arrival at Destination Time” feature is basically useless on long distance trips, since it can’t seem to deal with distances of more than 1000 miles, and kept giving us impossible arrival times. The overall distance statistics feature is much more useful, however.

It was great for giving us a general idea of how to navigate new areas, but a lot of the time, we needed to refer to our National Geographic road atlas for more detail. So overall, I feel like the Magellan is great if you already have a general idea of the route you need to travel, but it’s kind of like MapQuest in that it has a few direction-finding glitches it needs to work out.

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