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142 of 142 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Reception, sturdy, BUT so-so Interface and screen, September 24, 2003
The Good:As far as handheld GPS units I have used the Garmin GPSMAP 76, the eTrex Vista, eTrex Legend, and this Magellan unit. The first thing I noticed when I started the unit up in my house was that it was extremely good at finding satellites. None of the Garmin units could consistently get a fix inside the house, and when they could, they had to be next to a window. This unit can get a decent fix just about anywhere in the house and I am on the lower floor of a two-story duplex. This ability to get a signal is also true in a car and on the trail. The feel of the unit is solid. It has a rubber rim, which feels good in the hand, and the smaller lighter form makes it a better fit in the hand than the GPSMAP 76. The buttons have nice backlighting and the placement at the bottom makes it easier to operate without obscuring the screen with your fingers. The color screen makes topo maps and highway maps much easier to read than on the grayscale units. This is especially so with topo maps where water is blue, trails are black and topo lines are green as opposed to Garmin units where you have to put the cursor over some lines to check if they are topo lines or roads. The only downside to this is that the Magellan maps are not quite as good as the Garmin ones. Though they are decent. The Bad: First off, the unit has a Barometer, thermometer and compass like the 76S and the vista, but there is NO barometric altimeter, which adds to the GPS elevation accuracy. This came as a real surprise to me. I could not understand why that would be left out when it seemed like all it would take was software once the sensors were there. I talked to Magellan and they said there were no plans to update the software to include a barometric altimeter. While the sportrak color has the best resolution of any of the Magellan handheld units, the screen is not nearly as sharp as the Garmin units. Colors are also a bit washed out even after adjusting the contrast. And the screen harder to read in daylight due to the background of the LCD simply being darker. The interface is miles behind the Garmin units. It is hard to navigate through the menus. Thing are present under some screens but not others and there is little that is intuitive. I found I would figure out how to do something then could not repeat the process. Turning on and off the magnetic compass for instance takes digging into nested menus as opposed to the one button push it takes on the Garmin units. The vista comes with a little manual while the Sportrak comes with a large one. The reason is obvious. One of my biggest bones to pick with the unit is the lack of field options. On garmin units you can display vertical speed, Stopped time/moving time, coordinates (Magellan only displays these on the coordinates screen), and many other nice fields. On the Magellan units the options are limited to the basics while Garmin offers fields I didn't know I wanted but I love. Conclusions: The strongest points for this unit are the color screen and its ability to acquire satellites. These points are sometimes overshadowed by the interface and the sharpness of the screen. Though, every time you are in a deep canyon or on a tree covered trail and all the other units are struggling you'll be happy. The alarms are something that no eTrex units have, while the smaller size is definitely something to think about when comparing it to a GPSMAP 76 or 76S. I like the unit overall, but I wish the software would be updated to be more flexible and user friendly. You just can't have it all.
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