I've always been a fan of car navigation systems associating them with such futuristic inventions like flying cars, underwater cities and an understandable tax code.

I acquired the Magellan Roadmate 700 from a local retailer (Circuit City) for a planned road trip to New York from Washington DC. This was not quite a "blind" purchase as I had read many online forums to find what actual consumers recommended.

My key concern in choosing the Roadmate 700 was the issue of map coverage. Other navigation systems would have maps of a specific "region" and if you were travelling to a new region in the same trip - you would be out of luck either having to scale back on the points of interests you loaded or perhaps having no maps at all.

The 700 on the otherhand covers the entire United States on a built in hard drive. There is no need to select regions based on your trip - its all there available for you to use. An additional bonus is that the interface to use the device is fairly well thought out.

Trips can be planned by shortest time (use major highways), distance, or even be configured to avoid toll roads. While the GUI controls are seamless and the LCD screen is outstanding, the OS logic needs a little work - when selecting points of interest, you still have to choose the state you are interested in, along with the name. While its possible that a driver in New York might be interested in the nearest gas station in Texas, I think most consumers would have been happy if there was a "nearest point of interest based on my current position" option.

The device once it has locked on to your position provides perfect voice navigational instructions - telling you when to turn both with a voice warning (the volume can be a bit low at highway speeds) as well as a tone signal. Your position gets tracked in real time on a map which allows you to scale in/out as much as one could reasonable want.


Unfortunately at a price point over $1000 there are a couple defects which ultimately caused me to return the unit.

1. Updates to the mapping software have hidden cost. The unit does not come packaged with the mini-usb cable necessary to make a connection to your computer. Nor is it clear from the documentation how one obtains map updates. This is the sort of nickel and dime stuff that annoys me with $300 printers but which downright frustrates me for $1200 products.

2. The air vent mount that comes standard with the unit is useless garbage. Worse than that, it potentially will break your car's air vent and most certainly will disrupt the climate control of your vehicle. Turns will cause the unit to shift will driving, and the "release" mechanism to undock it when parking (in order to prevent theft) is not user friendly. Again - too cheap for such an expensive product.

3. The unit takes approximately 2-3minutes after powering up to orient itself. What this means is that for 2-3minutes you can either sit in your car and wait for this to happen or "head in the general direction" of where you want to go and wait for the device to catch up.

4. While signal loss is not much of an issue in cities due to WAAS coverage (consider this GPS+), when it does happen the unit will sometimes hang. This requires you powering off and back on..then waiting the aforementioned few mentions for it to figure things out. Needless to say this can be problematic in a city such as New York.

5. I'm concerned that the use of a hard drive (vs. solid state electronics such as compact flash media) will eventually cause the device to fail due to constant vibration as well as unexpected power interruption from turning the car on and off. The Roadmate 500 uses compact flash, but does not use sizes large enough to carry the entire USA.

Overall I rate the product as a B+. It is certainly one of the best portable car navigation system one can currently buy, but the defects make it seem like a "beta" product to be used by early adopters. The makers of the 700 is aware of the problems I've mentioned and are coming out with larger compact flash sizes (the roadmate 550), better device mounts, and hopefully will continue to refine the points of interest interface. The odds are good that if you buy a roadmate 700 now, you will be putting it for sale on E-bay within a year in order to get a more well rounded product.

Update: For a more recommendation navigation system (although not necessarily perfect) see my StreetPilot 2620 review.

Recommended: No