potential unmet
Written: Aug 21 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: powerful concept, good for confirming you are headed in the right direction
Cons: lousy support/documentation, maps by county not state or interstate
The Bottom Line: Buy a garmin etrex with waas which is water resistant and about the same price.
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| cmgts1's Full Review: Magellan GPS Companion for Handspring Visor |
Having a handspring and being a Boy Scout leader I thought the natural thing to do would be to add the gps.
The technology is really cool. To be able to tell your position to within (in theory) 300 feet is great.
Reality is different however.
The system seems to do great on receiving the satellite signal even within a car, but despite the owners manual assertion that the system keeps track of your last position and uses it for a starting point(intialization), reducing time necessary for intialization, reality is if you don't re-enter your approximate location, it takes several minutes.
Intialization is easily accomplished by tapping on a world map than again on the regional map that follows, but it gets old and is just shorter than having no initialization data at all.
You can download a map from the included software and watch the marker showing your position move as you drive down the road, which is really cool if you are not the driver.
Maps are by county, without any state or regional maps. If you are a salesman going somewhere in a city you have never been to before, you can download the right map if you know the county you will be going through, see the marker for the location you want (if you download lat/longitude you can get off mapquest for destination) and it will show roads that you can use to get from where you are to where you want to be.
For the average person this rarely be useful.
My hope was to download topographic maps for a trip to the Philmont high adventure camp run by the boy scouts in New Mexico, but topographic map software was over $100 and I could not justify the cost. Downloading waypoints (places you expect to pass along the way) was moderately helpful when the trail was poorly marked and we had no clue where we were, but it would take 2-3 minutes to get a fix so you would know where you were and the waypoint would be given to you as the crow flys which was not that helpful.
When I tried the email support I got no response two times. I would not waste my time a third.
Finally having the time to call tech support when they were open the technician knew absolutely nothing about the visor half of the combo.
I wound up not using my gps for several weeks waiting for this opportunity to call tech support and due to no real documentation being included.
If you get an error saying gps module not detected do a soft reset and that may solve your problem. Did the tech know that? Was there a faq on the magellan website? Was there a troubleshooting guide in documentation? (documentation tells you how to install software only). Did tech support respond to email? The answer is no.
Documentation does not even tell you how to use the system.
Everything I learned about using the system was from trial and error or the help menu on the visor (which was almost adequate).
The gps and features are very powerful, but due to lack of documentation it will take you hours to figure out how to use it by trial and error and help menus.
When backpacking here in flat florida where you cannot really use a topographic map and a compass to determine location and routes I will definitely have it with me though.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
cmgts1
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Location: orlando, fl, usa
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
hi tech addict!
Army vet/ former disney cast member.
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