Magellan eXplorist 710 Waterproof Hiking GPS

by Magellan

Product Features

• Rugged, waterproof outdoor GPS with three-inch touchscreen and button controls
• 3.2 megapixel camera, microphone, and speaker to record geo-referenced images and voice notes
• World Edition preloaded map, Summit series USA topographic mapping, and City Series USA for city streets
• Barometric altimeter and three-axis electronic compass for accurate altitude, weather, and directional info; has 500MB space on the internal memory for user storage
• Powered by two AA batteries for up to 16 hours of use; The memory on the device is solid state flash memory; have microSD card slots
• Core Outdoor Navigation-rugged & Waterproof
• High Sensitivity GPS Reception With Aesthetic Mapping & Accurate Navigation To Find The Way Using More Than 30 Navigational Data Fields
• Create Waypoints, Record Tracks & Route From Point To Point
• Integrated 3.2 Megapixel Camera, Microphone & Speaker Enables Outdoor Enthusiasts To Record Geo-referenced Images & Voice Notes
• Superior Maps With 3d Perspective View

› See more product details

Product Description

Amazon.com

Rugged and waterproof (IPX-7), the eXplorist 710 combines high sensitivity GPS reception with easy to read mapping and accurate navigation. Find your way using more than 30 navigational data fields. Create waypoints, record tracks, and route from point to point. The integrated 3.2 mega-pixel camera, microphone, and speaker enable outdoor enthusiasts to record geo-referenced images and voice notes. Relive your outdoor adventures on the device, on your computer, or share with others on various online communities like geocaching.com.

The eXplorist 710 combines high sensitivity GPS reception with easy to read mapping and accurate navigation. Click to enlarge.

The eXplorist 710 packs the most accurate maps into the palm of your hand. The World Edition map allows for 2D or 3D viewing angles. It includes a complete road network in United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia and major roads throughout the rest of the world and provides cartographic orientation in almost any location. This unique, preloaded map also includes water features, urban and rural land use, and a realistic shaded relief background. The eXplorist 710 also includes City Series and Summit Series USA maps, Summit Series USA is a highly detailed topographic map based on 1:24,000 scale source maps. The maps includes contour lines, land use areas, trails, waterway7s and points of interest. Locate the nearest trailhead. Search for the nearest bike shops, fuel stations, or potable water source. Navigate safely in 3D perspective view while knowing the boundaries between private and public lands. City Series USA allows your eXplorist device to navigate through the city streets with turn-by-turn directions on your way to escaping to your favorite open spaces. Enter a variety of destinations, including address book entries, waypoints, geocaches, or previous destinations.

Enjoy paperless geocaching with the eXplorist 710. Download and view more than 20 unique characteristics of each cache and view, search, filter on the device. Details include name, location, description, hider, size, difficulty, terrain, hint, and recent logs created by other geocachers.

The best of both worlds, the eXplorist 710 combines the user friendliness of a touch screen with the reliability of two customizable hard buttons. Program the hard buttons to your two favorite or most used functions. Powered by two AA batteries, the eXplorist 710 will last up to 15 hours under normal conditions. To help conserve power, use the suspend mode to turn off the device but maintain GPS tracking. You can also adjust power management settings to your preference.

Magellan's award winning OneTouch favorites menu is now on our handheld devices. It provides instant access to bookmarks of favorite places. Set your home, base camp, and car. Easily re-assign a new location for each new adventure. 12 customizable icons to create personalized searches, save unique locations, or assign quick access to your favorite screens.

eXplorist 710 Features

3.2 Mega-Pixel Camera with Auto Focus

Take photographs along your journey and reference the location where each photograph was taken afterward. Use the Integrated Microphone and Speaker to Record voice memos and playback in the field! All multimedia content can be geo-tagged with coordinates or attached to waypoints.

World Edition Pre-loaded Map

The World Edition includes a detailed road network, water features, urban and rural land use, and a realistic shaded relief background.

Summit Series USA Pre-loaded Map

Summit Series USA is highly detailed topographic map based on 1:24,000 scale source maps. The map includes contour lines, land use areas, trails, waterways, and points of interest. Locate the nearest trailhead. Search nearest bike shops, fuel stations, or potable water source. Navigate safely in 3D perspective view while knowing the boundaries between private and public lands.

Three-Inch Touch Screen

An intuitive touch screen user interface and sunlight readable screen makes the eXplorist easy-to-use in almost any environment.

Online Experience Sharing

The eXplorist GPS receiver supports GPX file format and connects seamlessly to a PC as an external drive. Simply save files to and from the device and share with your favorite online communities.

3-axis Electronic Compass & Barometric Altimeter

Always know exactly where you are going, which direction is north, and your accurate altitude about sea level with built-in sensors. Know the direction to the geocache while standing still. Measure barometric pressure over time to track changing weather conditions. Use a number of different digital compass� to always understand your cardinal directions.

Paperless Geocaching

Download and view more than 20 unique characteristics of each cache and view, search, filter on the device. Details include name, location, description, hider, size, difficulty, terrain, hint, and recent logs created by other geocachers.

OneTouch Menu

Magellan's OneTouch favorites menu provides instant access to bookmarks of favorite places, personalized searches, and quick access to your favorite screens.

16 Hours of Battery Life

Powered by two AA batteries, the eXplorist GPS receiver will last up to 16 hours under normal conditions. To help conserve power, use the suspend mode to turn off the device but maintain GPS tracking.

Rugged and Waterproof

The eXplorist GPS Receiver is submersible and tested to IPX-7 standards, which means it can withstand depths up to 1-meter for a total of 30 minutes.

High Sensitivity GPS

The integrated SiRFStarIII GPS chipset provides up to 3 meters accuracy with the assistance of WAAS, EGNOS, and MSAS to provide the most accurate location information worldwide.

City Series

City Series USA allows your eXplorist device to navigate through the city streets with turn-by-turn directions on your way to escaping to your favorite open spaces. Enter a variety of destinations, including address book entries, waypoints, geocaches, or previous destinations.

What's in the Box

Magellan eXplorist 710 GPS Receiver, Standard Mini USB Cable, Quick Start Guide, 2 AA Batteries, Geocaching.com 30 Day Free Trial Flyer, Energizer Battery Coupon

	eXplorist GC	eXplorist 110	eXplorist 310	eXplorist 510	eXplorist 610	eXplorist 710
Memory	2GB	-	2GB	2GB+MicroSD	4GB+MicroSD	8GB+MicroSD
Best in Class Base Map	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Updateable / Loadable Maps	-	-	✔	✔	✔	✔
Camera and Microphone	-	-	-	✔	✔	✔
Compass and Barometer	-	-	-	-	✔	✔
Summit Series Maps	-	-	-	-	✔	✔
City Series Maps	-	-	-	-	-	✔
Features	Dedicated geocaching device that comes with features beginner or advance geocachers will appreciate.	A solid device with all the basic navigation you’ll need to get to your campsite and back.	Customize your device with your own map content from Nat Geo, Navionics, Fishing Hot Spots and more.	Capture and share your adventures with the built in camera and microphone. Shoot stills and video, with geotagging and voice annotations.	Increase safety and precision with additional sensors, elevation and barometric altimeter to predict weather conditions.	The ultimate navigation tool with the ability to get you from your doorstep to summit and back again.

Product Description

Magellan TX0710SGXUS Explorist 710 Handheld GPS Receiver With Outdoor Recreation Maps & Driving Directions To Navigate From Doorstep To Summit

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Needs Another Year In Development June 2, 2011

By Michael Nelson

Amazon Verified Purchase

Pros:

Camera: Picture quality of the 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera is remarkably good (up to 1600x1200 pixels), the low resolution video camera not so much (video resolution is only 320x240 pixels and playback is rough and jerky) . Photographs are automatically geotagged and can be attached to your notes for the geocache. The photographs and videos can also be viewed on the internal picture viewer.

Microphone: There is a microphone and speaker for voice annotation so you can record spoken notes in the field. These notes can also be attached to a geocache.

Feel: Feels good in my hand, solid and substantial. The large loop at the bottom is perfect for attaching a lanyard (although no lanyard is supplied).

Construction: The 710 seems very well-built mechanically, with O-rings to seal it against water intrusion. It is waterproof to IPX-7 specifications. The speaker, microphone and camera lens are all outside the sealed area, but I assume they are waterproofed some way.

Receiver: The SiRFstarIII(tm) based receiver locks in solidly and holds lock even indoors and in heavy tree cover and "concrete canyons" in the city. The accuracy and position jump around some when you don't have a clear view of the sky, but it seldom loses lock.

Memory: 8GB of memory is included, and there is a card slot for microSD cards up to 36GB. 8GB is a LOT of standard memory for a GPS!

Maps: Turn-by-turn navigation works very well, and the excellent Summit series USA topographical and City series USA turn-by-turn navigation maps with voice guidance are included in addition to the World Edition basemap.

Batteries: Comes with a pair of expensive, long lasting Eveready Ultimate Lithium batteries. Other brands usually don't come with any batteries at all. There is also a coupon included that gets you $2.00 off on a set of Eveready Ultimate Lithiums.

Altimeter: After calibration to my home elevation, the barometric altimeter seems to stay calibrated well.

Customizable hard buttons: You can assign frequently used functions to the two buttons on the side of the unit for easy access.

Display: The high resolution display excellent indoors or in shade when backlight is on, but it's another story in bright or hazy sunlight. See below.

Batteries: has settings for Lithium, Alkaline, and Rechargeable batteries

"Four CornerTM" menu: works well and is easy to get used to. Tapping the center of the screen once brings up the Four Corner menu. The upper left corner defaults to a "Dashboard" screen that has a compass display and 8 data fields. Each of the data fields can be customized to show the data you want to see on that screen. You can also choose a conventional compass display, a "Road" display that gives a psuedo-3d display of the road ahead like a car GPS, a rotating strip-style compass, a satellite display, a barometer display, an altimeter display, a display filled with data fields only, and a profile display. Tapping the upper right corner brings up the "One Touch" menu (see below). The lower left corner gets you the main menu, and from the main menu you can choose any of the top level functions or go into a Settings sub-menu to tweak the 710 to just how you like it. The lower right corner always gets you a context-sensitive scrolling menu that changes according to what function you are using at the moment.

"Dashboard" screen: is useful and easily customizable (see above).

"One TouchTM" Menu: This is a nice idea, but won't allow me to do some things I would like to have on "one touch" basis (for instance "Cancel Route").

Paperless geocaching: Excellent ... contains all the info you might need including pictures that appear in the cache description on geocaching.com. It does NOT include the gallery pictures though. This unit comes with a certificate good for a 30 day Premium membership at geocaching.com.

Support: The guys in the "Magellan Insider" group are super-helpful unpaid volunteers. The Magellan Product Manager for this product is very helpful and takes a personal interest in customer problems.

Cons:

Display: High resolution displays don't work well in bright sunlight and this one is just as bad or worse than the Garmin Colorado and Oregon displays. If you hold it at just the right angle to the sun you can read it easily, but at most angles it is so dark as to be unreadable. This makes it particularly bad for use in a fixed mount on a bicycle, where you will almost never be able to read it. It also has a strange interaction with polarized sunglasses that causes the whole display to appear in shades of gold. Anything white on the screen (including the white on black text during boot) shows as gold through polarized sunglasses. This makes it even more difficult to read than the Garmin hi-res screens which do not have this strange interaction with polarized sunglasses. The backlight helps, and it comes on when you tap the screen, but the backlight is also a major consumer of electrical power and the more it is on, the shorter battery life is.

Touch screen: Sometimes it is somewhat unresponsive, and scrolling through long menus (there are many) can be difficult to do without inadvertently selecting something. Later versions of the firmware have addressed this to some extent by adding up/down arrows at the bottom, but not all long menus have them yet. There are no slick features like multitouch as found on Apple touch screens.

System boot: It takes quite a while to boot up (about 1 minute) and acquire satellite lock. However, once it gets a lock, it seems to hold it well. Unfortunately, periodically the unit will announce it is "restarting to improve performance", and you get to watch it go through the reboot procedure again, and afterward it doesn't seem to have improved performance at all. It did that on mine five times in one morning geocaching session.

Route calculation: At least on my unit running the latest firmware (4.83 at the time of this writing), calculating routes can take ridiculous amounts of time. One day I was 1.5 blocks and one right angle turn away from a geocache when it decided it needed to recalculate the route. It took three minutes to recalculate the route. This was in an open area, clear view of the sky in all directions, all bars lit up on the satellite display and the dashboard indicating "excellent" for signal strength. It often takes a really long time to calculate routes, sometimes I have had to power-cycle it and when it comes back up it finishes calculating the route immediately. These delays in route calculation happen annoyingly often.

Keyboard: This is an incredibly poorly-designed implementation of a touch screen keyboard. They have split it into two screens for the alphabet and you have to keep going back and forth. Even if the word you are spelling is all on the second page, there is no spacebar on the second page so you have to go back to the first page to get a space, or to capitalize a letter. It is by far the worst keyboard I have ever seen on a handheld device. Hopefully they can fix this in the firmware. Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch have the keyboard Magellan ought to be emulating.

Battery consumption: This thing loves to chew its way through AA cells. They advertise 16 hours, but I can only see it doing this if the unit is turned off. 2700mAh Powerex NiMH cells are good for maybe 3-4 hours. Non-rechargeable (and expensive) Lithiums maybe 8. You can extend battery life by setting it to time out and go into a mode where GPS tracking continues but the display goes off, and you awaken it with a tap of the power button. This helps a lot, but every time it comes awake from this mode the compass needs to be recalibrated, which is pretty annoying.

Compass: The compass needs to be recalibrated frequently. According to the manual, to do it, you dig down into the setup menu and choose "calibrate compass", and it displays a diagram of a figure 8 pattern they want you to move the unit through while rotating your wrist so the unit is upside up part of the way and upside down part of the way. I do that, waving it around like an idiot for five or ten seconds and then it tells me "calibration failed, please try again". Sometimes I go through four or five iterations of this before it says "calibration successful", only to have it go out of calibration again in a few minutes. I have learned through the eXplorist user forum that you don't actually have to go to the calibration screen to do this, you can just look at the little red compass calibration indicator at the top of each screen and wave it around if it is red (it turns gold when it is in calibration), but you still have to do this very, very frequently. On the numerous Garmin units I have had, one calibration of the compass lasts until you either power it off and back on or change the batteries. This is surely a bug that needs to be fixed.

Menu system: Although the "four corners" menu system is a nice start, too many commonly used functions are buried too many clicks deep and on long scrolling lists that have no easy way to navigate them. For instance, if you are geocaching and decide to cancel your hunt for the current one, you have to tap the center of the screen to bring up the four corner menu, then tap the lower right to bring up the context menu, then scroll down carefully several screens while being careful not to accidentally select something (if you do, you'll have to start the process all over again) before you get to the "cancel route" choice, and then you have to confirm with one more press that is what you really want to do. Read more ›

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best GPS I've used (or seen!) December 28, 2010

By eyecore

Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This GPS does so many things its difficult to know where to start. So, I'll start with the negatives...First, the unit comes with Energizer Lithium Ion batteries; unfortunately, the ones I received were dead from the get-go. (Unit wouldn't turn on. Tried some rechargeable batteries, and everything lit up wonderfully.) And on that note, the unit can even optimize itself for alkaline, lithium, or rechargeable batteries, so you're well covered there!

Other slight negatives: it takes several seconds for this to "boot up." It's not horrible, but it's not ideal, either. Also, when the screen gets wet, it's a little difficult to "scroll" through menus (it's touch-screen.) Again, it's not bad enough to worry about - and given touch-screen technology today, it probably cannot be bettered by any competitor.

Now, the actual device: I've never owned a Magellan, always going with Garmin for both handheld/hiking GPS's and car navigation as well. This Magellan is great; the screen is bright and crisp, the menus (for the most part) are simple to navigate and understand without having to go through any manuals. Not just a hiking GPS, it can also give you street directions while driving (though it doesn't have the text-to-speech stuff so it says to "turn right" and not "turn right on Main Street.") The amount of POIs (points of interests) is somewhat staggering: not only main attractions and stores and such that most car navigation GPS's can do, but also water and various "outdoor" attractions. It is seemingly built for handle both hiking and metro areas equally well.

The 3MP camera is nice to have; it produces images clear that look good on-screen, but you won't be printing any glossy landscape scenes with it. (The camera has digital zoom but no flash.) A great add-on to the GPS that isn't obtrusive in any way, so if you want to use your digital SLR instead, you don't even notice the one attached here.

The signal remained very strong on a path about 8 feet wide with tall trees all around; while I haven't tried it in a urban city area (tall buildings, where car GPS's often fail), for outdoor areas, I feel it did quite well. There is somewhat of a heft to the device; you're not going to strap this onto a ball-cap like you can with some of the smaller hand-held GPS's (Geko's, for instance.) But, put into a pocket (mine kept signal inside a jacket pocket) or clamped to a backpack or belt, and you'll appreciate the quality and heft and not really think much about how heavy it really is. (Only a pound or so, but it feels quite solid to just hold it in your hand.)

As far as batter life: I have some 4-year-old rechargeable batteries that I've been using (they're on their way out...don't hold a full charge anymore), and I've got about 4-5 hours of battery life (so far, they're not entirely dead yet.) You can configure the screen to dim itself quickly or wait in bright mode if battery life is paramount and you don't have others (or go into "sleep" mode, where the screen goes off completely, but the unit continues to track your movement.) I've actually made the screen stay bright for some time while I show it off and played with all its features, and, given the batteries I've been using, it's performed quite well.

While I haven't dunked it in water (and don't plan to, on purpose at least), it's held up to quite a bit of rain on a couple mild-to-moderate hikes and hasn't been bothered at all. I wish I could speak more to its many geo-caching features, but I personally don't do that; if you do, I have no doubt that this eXplorist would do the job, and do it well.

Would definitely recommend, perhaps for both a hiking and car navigation GPS, though for car navigation, some kind of dash-holder would be nice so the passenger doesn't have to hold it. A great GPS unit that doesn't seem to have much in the way of competition at all: for consumers, this looks like the best-of-the-best.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Happy eXplorist 710 user and Geocacher! December 20, 2010

By David Carr

I bought my first GPSr about 7 years ago when I started ATVing out the distant areas of the Mojave Desert, however, neither GPS technology nor electronic measurement equipment was foreign to me. I had spent more than 20 years in the Precision Measurement field calibrating, repairing, aligning and purchasing FFA approved test equipment, which I believe has given me a pretty good eye for both quality and junk equipment! Over these past seven years I¡¦ve owned a number of GPSrs as well as having the opportunity to use many, many others of different brands and types. This has helped me to build MY wish list for what I would like to see in a hand help GPSr and after using the eX710 for some time now I believe I¡¦ve found the unit that gets the closest. This unit is fast and accurate; the screen resolution and the ability to be seen in the bright desert sun is great; the user interface is easily understood and everything is within a couple of clicks, not hidden within menu and menu; it is a quality unit, being rugged and water proof and the reloaded maps are superior to most, if not all, of the preloaded maps I¡¦ve seen on other units. As a Jeeper, ATVer and dirt biker this unit has held up to every test I¡¦ve been able to throw at it. As a Geocacher I find this GPSr to be a truly paperless caching unit, not only downloading the descriptions and hints, but also the description pictures from the HTML on the website, as well as having the capability to log my finds, maintenance need and other items on the unit ¡V being able to sync the logs to Geocaching.com on my PC afterwards.

To be honest ¡V there is only one negative that I have with the unit - it is boring! ş You see, several of the units that I¡¦ve used in the past I¡¦ve had to spend hours and hours working on maps and preloading the units before hitting the trial. Then, after turning home, again spending hours afterwards trying to work through the logging process of getting everything properly input into GC.com or downloading my tracks ¡V which pretty much became a hobby in itself. However, with this unit I just load it and go and then when returning home I connect it and within a few minutes everything is logged. The other day, after returning from a Jeep run I had everything logged and put away in about 20 minutes, after logging 60+ caches¡K

This is a great GPSr and you will enjoy it!
David