Magellan RoadMate 1700 7-Inch Portable GPS Navigator (Electronics)
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Magellan RoadMate 1700 7-Inch Portable GPS Navigator (Electronics)
Magellan RoadMate 1700 7-Inch Portable GPS Navigator (Electronics)
I'll get thus out of the way up front: the Magellan RoadMate 1700's 7-inch display is beautiful and easy to see from anywhere. We're using it in a Dodge Grand Caravan, not quite a truck or RV but big enough that we could appreciate the big display. This is absolutely hands down a great big GPS display. That said, size isn't everything and we've experienced some ups and downs with this unit.
First the positives.
We first used the 1700 on a long road trip for a drive from Indianapolis to Myrtle Beach. That's about 750 miles, 13-14 hours of driving and gas stops. The 1700 was very accurate in mapping and directing us on the trip down, taking us the most common, well known highway route.
As we got to know it, we came to really like the feature that shows you what gas stations, restaurants, and hotels are at upcoming exits.
The turn by turn voice directions were generally very clear and easy to follow.
The additional oversize mounting device that came with it was very big, easy to attach, and easy to adjust. It gave us good range of adjustment options for getting the unit positioned right on the large sloping windshield in the van.
The interface itself is fairly intuitive and easy to use, at least for the most common functions.
But, not everything was great with this. Some of the negatives we experienced were:
The touchscreen on ours seems slightly off. At first I thought I was touching a wrong button but then realized that the touch points on the centers of the buttons I was trying to touch weren't reacting. I would have to touch the screen 1/4" or so above what looked like the top of a button to get that button to react.
If you are on a road that it doesn't consider a highway, it can't show you restaurants at upcoming intersections as easily as highway exits. You have to go to a different part of the system for that.
Splits in highways really confuse it and cause it to give confusing directions. When you come to a highway exit to another highway, typically you'll get 2-3 lanes to stay on the highway and another 2 lanes to exit to the other. The directions for an event like this if you're staying on the same road are something like "stay on the same road in .5 miles." And it will show you that direction hundreds of miles out, stating that your next maneuver will be stay on the same road in 168 miles. Well, that's great until the immediate next direction is "highway exit in .2 miles." In this case, the direction really needed to be "take exit 168b in 168 miles." I really don't care for directions telling me what I'm not doing but I need the directions for making a change. When there's 2 parts of an interchange, don't tell me for 168 miles to stay on the same road and only give me .2 miles warning for the exit.
Related to this, it had trouble with similarly named highways in South Carolina. There as a highway (just making up the number) like SC 20 and another SC 20 business route. The unit had a hard time differentiating the "stay on the same road" directions when these 2 similar roads would split.
Other reviewers have noted that the 30 minute battery life isn't enough (agreed) and the lack of an AC power adapter for home is bad (also agreed). I wanted to be able to check out my route back in advance without setting in the car and 30 minutes (if fully charged) just isn't enough time.
That brings me to my biggest complaint: routing just isn't flexible enough. I guess I'm just spoiled by Google maps where I can drag part of a route and it will calculate a new route. It was literally impossible to get the 1700 to produce a route for us that everyone we met in Myrtle Beach swore was the best way back to Indy. The options of fastest, shortest, most highway, least highway just aren't good enough. I really want to be able to touch the map and reroute and this has nothing similar.
Other more minor complaints: the maps were out of date when we got the unit brand new. Who knows how long this had been setting around. Firmware was also a couple of versions out of date. Guess what, it has to be charged 3 hours or more in a running car before you have the 30 minute battery charge to hook it to your PC USB cable (which it won't draw power from) and make those updates. Very inconvenient.
Some of the default settings were annoying. There's an auto screen saver mode that kicks in and blanks the screen after 20 minutes if nothing happens. Very disconcerting to have this happen after 20 minutes on a highway with no direction changes the first time, I thought the unit had malfunctioned. You'll probably also want to double check that U turns are turned off. And we found it much easier to use on highways with the auto-zoom at turns turned off. You'll want to get it set at a comfortable map scale for driving at highway speeds, you really don't want it autozooming to 1/4 mile scale for turns just to have to touch the zoom out button 7 times to get it back to your 70mph scale.
Parking garages confuse it. Yes, that's a function of it not getting a GPS signal in a garage, that's a technical limit of any GPS. But it's inconvenient to exit a parking garage and not know which way it expects you to turn at the exit.
Also, not a defect or flaw, but just to be sure you understand what you are getting with this: this is a GPS unit only with built in preloaded maps that can be updated from your PC. It does not receive live traffic data, road closures, or anything else live. We found that because of that and it's lack of customizable routing options, the best way to use it was with the Google Maps on our iphones. We'd check the iPhone maps for any coming traffic issues as we came to cities and we used the directions on the google maps iphone app on the way back to give us our preferred route and just plotted from city to city on the magellan, not ideal.
If all that concerns you is a big screen and you're content with the handful of routing options this gives, you'll probably do OK with this. I think there are probably better available options if you want more flexibility.
Magellan RoadMate 1700 7-Inch Portable GPS Navigator (Electronics)
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