cheap silver heels Magellan RoadMate 1700LM Portable Lifetime
I've never owned or used a GPS before, so I have nothing to compare with this. What had put me off all these devices previously was the small screen size of so many of them, and the very mixed reviews from brand to brand. It seemed like none of them stood out with reviewers. When I saw this one in a store, I decided to give it a try, and if it had the various problems I'd been reading about, then I'd return it. I'll start by saying I was not looking for a bluetooth compatible device to run my phone through, and I did not want to subscribe to any service for "extras." Since I wear reading glasses, the huge 7" screen was a big plus in getting me to try this out. I can read everything without glasses!
We tested it yesterday on a long 400 mile trip. You can choose various options: fastest, fewest miles, freeways, no freeways. I chose "fastest", and the route it set up was faster than we were doing this route previously, and everything was perfect, never an error in anything. You get alerts about 2 miles before a turn, you get lane assist, close to the turn you get another comment, and then very close to the turn you hear a bell or some other sound alert you can choose. When we came upon places where the road split and you could get confused, there was always an alert to either stay on the current road, or take the right fork, etc. You would also see the appropriate road signs on the screen at this point, indicating the lanes which applied to each sign. This was REALLY useful! If I deviated from the path it set up for some reason (i.e. stopping at a coffee shop), it picked right up and got me back on track as I left my stop. I used it to find coffee shops, a store I wanted to find, and so on. Since when you look up things, for example Costco, you get the full address and phone number. So I can avoid cell phone information charges! You can find wherever you want to go, add it into the trip, and in the whole trip with a lot of stops to new places, not a single glitch. It has both day and night screen versions....the day one is quite bright so you can scale it back with a dark, lower light background for night driving.
It's very intuitive. I deliberately did NOT do more than quickly peruse the manual. On this trip, I easily figured out the features and how to access them, very quick and easy, and everything soon became second nature.
It has built-in AAA information, too, which could be useful.
When you type it's a qwerty keyboard, but there is another option for the other style keyboard too if you want that. The keyboard is nice and large due to the big 7" screen. You can zoom in and out in the screen to see more or less, it has 2D or 3D, although frankly, I don't see a huge difference in the two. There are a lot more features I'm probably not remembering right now, but I really love this thing. I'm a convert!
Cons: I think the built-in rechargeable battery is probably fairly useless. When you use this, you absolutely MUST have it plugged into the car charger. The battery seems to die down within 10 or so minutes of battery-only use. So don't plan to run on battery power! (This may be true of all GPS units). I bought an extra house charger for it, but I can now see that was a waste of money, basically. When you turn the car off (even while it is plugged in), you get a message that it's going onto battery power, so obviously it doesn't stay "on" when the engine is off. So when we turned the car off, we also turned off the GPS.
Another Con: The great large, easily read screen turned out to be a bit of a negative: It's really too big to put in the window area, it blocks your sight. Probably smaller would be better....or if I could figure out a place to put it where it's easily seen yet not in the window area. Darn...
Voice/Sound: It's a woman's voice, a bit tinny, and the sound could definitely have been richer and better. But it's OK. The speaker is on the back side, so if you had this on your lap as I did, the voice couldn't be heard well that way. The unit is better in its upright position. I'm planning to get some sort of dashboard holder to do this (can't mount it on the windshield in Calif).
I can't comment on the longevity since I haven't had it long. I hope it will last a long time without problems.
I gave this 5 stars because it does exactly what I want it to do in a great, easy to use way, and the screen is HUGE and easy to read.
Get your
Magellan RoadMate 1700LM Portable Lifetime Now!
