vehicle gps units

The roadmate 500 (and it's larger brother the 700) are the cream of the crop when it comes to economical auto navigation systems. Make not mistake about it, this is NOT a general purpose GPS. The roadmate does one thing and one thing only -- it helps you navigate your auto. To start up, you download the area of interest into the device. It comes with a 128mb compact flash card and you can buy additional cards if you so desire. Areas are typically things like an entire state or for large states like California, "Norther California". From there, you just tell it where you want to go with it's excellent on screen keyboard or select a location by name from it's points of interest database. The POI database contains restaurants, malls, hotels, and other things of interest to travellers, but you won't find the nearest chair store -- it's not a complete yellowpages. You can specify an exact street address or a street and cross street. From there, you just follow the directions. The screen is large and bright, but there's no need to look at it while driving. The voice prompts are excellent. You are warned when you are approaching a turn or freeway entrance/exit and you are told if it's left or right. When I drive to my home, the it tells me "approaching destination on your left" and then "you have arrived". If I were to stop the car exactly when it told me, I'd literally be staring out the window at my front door. It's locations are precise. This precision speaks to the quality of the built-in database. Another lovable thing about the voice prompts is when it knows you have a complex maneuver coming up and warns you "approaching right turn followed by a freeway entrance on your left". The voice navigation is almost as good as a real human copilot. Overall, a great product that excels at it's intended usage. If you've used general purpose GPS's hooked to laptops for auto-navigation, this is a whole new experience in terms of quality and sophistication.

My first experience with car navigation GPS system was with a Hertz "NeverLost" in late 2002. We found it very easy to use with little instruction needed and were pleased at the quality and accuracy of the directions. The system provides voice-guided directions - we nicknamed it "Silicon Sally" or "Sally" for short.

With the RoadMate 500, we now have a "Sally" of our own in a very portable package. If you've used "NeverLost" before, operation will be a breeze. If not, it's very user-friendly, despite the lack of detailed information in the provided documentation.

This is a solid unit - terrific, bright touch screen, great speaker, easy to use controls, pretty intuitive interface. From a hardware standpoint, the major weakpoint seems to be the default mounting bracket, which slips into a dashboard vent. It works, but just about any of the forthcoming mounting options, especially the gooseneck mount, seem to be better choices. The supplied mapping data seems fairly complete - I'm guessing it's from late 2002 or early 2003 - all but one of the errors I've noted so far are due to construction that's occurred since August 2003. What's in the package:

RoadMate 500 unit, universal mount, dashboard/air vent mounting bracket, cig. lighter power for car use, A/C adapter for home use, Standard mini-USB to USB cable, 128MB pre-authorized CF card, printed doc ("Read Me First" foldout, PC appication Quick Start Guide, Basic Operation Instructions Manual, extended warranty info, registration info, promotional material), documentation CD (65-page reference guide and 9 page Welcome doc which provides a good overview of the unit, but is more marketing document than anything) and 4 CD software and mapping data package.

The necessary drivers to connect your PC are installed when you install the software, with the exception of Win98 drivers, which must be downloaded and installed from the Magellan Support page. Note that the docs on the CD are dated 7/22/2003 and some configuration options differ slightly from the firmware level in the RoadMate itself (mine was 3.10).

General observations:

The initial CF card loading was confusing - the door opens opposite of what it appears. You push it open the way it looks, but the door springs up back in toward the unit. A little hard to open and close, but looks to be fairly sturdy. Inserting the CF card is not obvious - the top card points to top of unit. However, when you open the door, you will almost certainly have the front facing down. This means you insert the CF card "upside down". None of the doc mentions this. If you try to put the card in the other way (top up when you have the CF door opened up, it is a very tight fit. Don't force it - this is the wrong way. There is no eject button for the card - very disappointing, especially given the engineering used for the door mechanism. The mapping data is organized by region - more like states and partial states - you can't select subsets and must load entire states and/or regions. For example, I live in Colorado and had to load the Colorado/Utah region, I couldn't just select Colorado.

The PC tool is a bit primative, but it only does two things - load data to a CF card and (optionally) authorize new cards.

After loading Colorado, my initial location showed me about 30 miles away in downtown Denver - "Initialize GPS" didn't seem to do anything, but "Set GPS position" allowed me to enter my address. This allowed me to check routing from my house to various destinations. It turns out had I waited about 5 minutes, the unit would've set its' own position.

The unit has a very good built in turorial, but should be fairly intuitive to operate even if you never watch it. The screen is large and bright. The user controls are to the right of the screen - Enter, Cancel, Locate, View, Option surround an 8-way thumbpad, with +/- zoom buttons.

Operation, routing and re-routing are very fast - much faster than I remember in the Hertz system. I tried to trick Sally a few times by missing turns on purpose with very close turns required and she correctly recalcuated the route everytime.

On the main map screen you can zoom to 350 feet, 700 feet, 1/4 mile, 1/2 mile, 1 mile, 2, 4, 10, 20, 50, 100, 150, 350, 700,
though not much data (apparently only very major roads after zooming to 1o miles). Detail close in was good and when you pan the map, street names are displayed for those streets not labeled on the map.

There are quite a few user-selectable options. If you like, "Sam" can direct you instead of "Sally" and you have control over color schemes, brightness, contrast (though auto-adjustment isn't enabled by default). There is also a seemingly complete diagnostics menu.

There are a few minor annoyances and wishlist items:

The next generation of hardware needs an eject button for the CF card.

"Perform the Action" should be context specific - e.g on the Cancel Guidance screen, "Yes" choice should read "Cancel Guidance?" or "Cancel Route?" and "No" should say "Return to Route" or "Do nothing" or something like that.

All the voice prompts should match the text on the main menu:

Select Address - by city or state
(prompt says "Street Address")

Address Book - Previous Destinations, List Addresses, Create New Entry

POI (Dining, ATM, Gas) - spell name, select category
(prompt says "Points of Interest")

Intersection - by city or state

In Previous Destinations, there is no delete option. They will scroll off, but you should be able to delete them, as you can in the address book.

There should be an option to turn off confirmation tone when moving cursor/pushing buttons...

There should be an option to specify the max number of automatic reroutes (currently fixed at 3) before cancelling route. Restarting the route involves only a few key presses, but if you pull off the road to get food or gas or whatever, you can use up "three chance" pretty quickly.

The doc is very poor at describing options available in the configuration menu. I still don't know where the tone options -Bell, Chime, beep - are used. And there is no information on any of the diagnostic menu choices, notably GPS status, Initialize GPS and Set GPS position and how/when they might be useful.

There needs to be an option to exclude regions or states from route or POI displays so that searches can be restricted to my current region of interest. You can do this with the 500 by loading only the regions you want, but if I have most of the US loaded for a long trip, I'd like to exclude searches without having to carry a laptop to reload the CF card.

I really wish there was an option to read the upcoming direction. Instead of "Left turn in point five miles", I'd like to be able to set an option to add the street, as in "Left turn in point five miles to Main Street"

There is an "Exclude" option for routing, but none to force use of specific waypoints (at least not that I could find). This would be a nice addition.

Despite the items above, this is a great unit (so far)...

I'm glad I've got "Sally" telling me where to go ... and my wife is too!

The unit requires registration and an authorization number from the manufacture before maps can be loaded into the compact flash card. This requires determining the CF card ID when registering. Instructions for this procedure are very poor and navigating Magellan's web site is tricky at best. If you enter the CF ID incorrectly, you cannot store any maps in the unit even if you are provided an authorization code for the CF card. Beware!