GPS Devices Life

Magellan RoadMate 2200T GPS Review - Great - Magellan RoadMate¿ 2200T Car GPS Receiver I recently purchased the RoadMate 2200T for my wife. Prior to selecting the RoadMate 2200T, I researched the inte...

Magellan 2200T - Service - Magellan RoadMate¿ 2200T Car GPS Receiver I purchased the Magellan 2200T Roadmate as a gift for my husband Christmas 2006. It worked fine, except when plot...

I have a lousy sense of direction. Seriously. I need to drive somewhere 5 times before i remember how to get there. Want to give me a North South East West heading? Forget it. I don’t carry a compass. If there’s a detour on my way to work, I have to call my wife at home to ask how to get around it. Yes, I’m that bad. So a GPS was a very good idea and we grabbed the Magellan RoadMate 2200T from Costco for the low price of $250. Has it made my driving easier? How is it on longer trips?

Read on, dear reader…

•• What it is ••

The Magellan RoadMate 2200T is a global position receiver meant for use the the car.

•• Features and Commentary ••

This GPS unit is fairly compact, yet has a full 3 inch screen measured diagonally. The brushed silver plastic case feels solid in hand and looks fairly fashionable. Since it’s a touch screen, there’s no clunky buttons or joystick to take up space. This unit is nicely compact.

The Magellan RoadMate 2200T is not only a voice navigation GPS, but also a text-to-speech. What does this mean? Everything that has text is read by the Lady in the GPS (LitGPS). Sometimes it sounds fine, other times it sounds horribly artificial. And when you’re typing something in, it proudly announces each letter as you spell it. So if you want everyone around you to know that you need to find a Wal-Mart, then this feature is for you. As well, the turn-by-turn navigation prompts will read the street or freeway you want to go to each time it gives a direction prompt. So at 2 miles, .5 miles, and at the turn itself, you may get a whole mouthful of stuff spat out to you.

The screen is a 3 full color screen that shows either a 3d heading or a top-down view. I prefer the 3d heading. The color on the screen is vibrant, but the there is a fair amount of pixilation. It’s almost as if the screen is blown up from a smaller resolution. If you’re looking for a beautiful, smooth anti-aliased screen and fonts, this is not the one for you. The screen certainly does the job, but it’s not the prettiest out there. One feature I do like is the switching to dark colors at night so the screen isn’t a blinding white. This feature is engaged automatically after dark. A very nice touch.

The Magellan RoadMate 2200T uses maps from Navteq, a 3rd party source of maps for various GPS units and online map sites. The map in this GPS is good, but sadly out of date. There is no update on the Magellan website for this map, and yet our home street is not in the GPS even though we’ve been living there for 3 years. Curiously, the navteq website is up to date. The updated mpas just haven’t been pushed to my GPS.

The Magellan RoadMate 2200T sports 1.4 million POI or Points of interest. This sounds like a lot, but when you’re touring the country, this quickly becomes a drawback. It is missing many many things that should be there. Example, we were driving through Oregon and wanted to find a Target store. The nearest one the GPS knew about was back in Washington, where we came from. And yet, the next exit down what did we find? A Target.

Another annoying thing about the POI feature is that it limits your search results to only 29 results. So if you want Italian food in a big place like Seattle, it will only give you the first 29 Italian joints it finds. And among those, it includes things like Pizza Hut (which is decidedly not Italian).

And the final annoyance is that when a course is plotted, you can’t find any POI other than gas, food, lodging and automotive service. Real-world usage: We were driving from Seattle to California and plotted our course. Along the way, we wanted to find a Target store for some items. Hitting the “Exit POI” button, I was amazed to find that it wouldn’t list that type of POI, only the 4 types I mentioned before. In order to find a Target, I had to cancel the entire route and the search for the store. This was maddening. If I’m on a road trip, I’m going to want to find cool things to look at or even find stores for necessary items. This isn’t an option when you have a course plotted. Apparently the GPS merely wants you to get there, not stop along the way.

The unit functioned fairly well on the journey. We only had a few hiccups in performance, but they were at odd times. We lost satellite in downtown San Francisco for some reason. It came back after a few more minutes of driving. The biggest loss was in Yosemite. While I understand the being a remote place is not ideal for high-tech devices (What? There’s no Wi-Fi in Yosemite? How am I supposed to check my email?), the unit froze up once we left. I could navigate the UI, but the map portion was frozen. A quick reset with a pen did the trick to get it back online, but the GPS should not have frozen up at all. Curiously, my folks Magellan GPS did the exact same thing at the exact same location, so I know the flaw is in the GPS software.

As far as battery life goes, the Magellan does a stellar job. We had the thing going nearly all day and only had to plug in the car charger once. The 8-hour boasted battery life is not a lie.

•• Conclusion ••

All of these annoyances aside, the unit is great for quick travel. It sure beats looking up directions on Mapquest or yahoo travel. While I wouldn’t use it for long road trips, it’s fine for getting me from point A to point B.

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