MISCELLANEOUS
Magellan RoadMate 700
By Ari Rubin
Posted on Tuesday, Jun 1, 2004

The Magellan RoadMate 700 is a portable GPS navigation system that can be taken in and out of a car, like a removable face plate on a radio. It attaches to the dash easily with a clip or to the windshield with a suction cup mount and draws power from the cigarette lighter. The unit offers three user settings so that different drivers can store their own addresses and customize the look and feel of the system. It has an internal hard rive, loaded with maps of the contiguous 48 United States and Canada.

I tested the unit on my recent trip from Queens, NY, (where I was celebrating my sister’s 23rd birthday at my mom’s house) to Cooperstown, NY, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I was accompanied on the trip by my friend Danny "DC" Cohen.

We got into the car around 7 p.m. and programmed the RoadMate 700 using the touch-screen pad to enter the address of the hotel we were staying at. The system requires you to enter the city, then the street, then the number. It eliminates letters and numbers that can’t possibly be the city that you’re looking for, because they’re not in the database, to help you type faster. We were then shown the map, with a little triangle showing the location of the car, and our route highlighted. As the screen lit up. DC exclaimed, "I feel like I’m in the future."

Just then, my sister came running out of the house and asked if we could drop her off at the subway. Now, the subway is about ten minutes away from my mother’s house, in the opposite direction from the highway where the RoadMate was telling us to go. No problem — the RoadMate recalculated the shortest possible route, on its own, instead of trying to redirect us to the route it had originally chosen. The route recalculation took a few seconds, and saved us at least ten minutes in driving time. This is a very cool feature, in case you miss a turn because the system can "think" along with its situation and redirect you from where you end up.

We dropped my sister off at 7:13 PM, and proceeded to the Van Wyck Expressway (we were originally supposed to take the Clearview). The unit spoke directions to us at 5, 2, .5 and .2 miles before a turn, and chimed as the turn was approaching. The screen showed the map most of the time, along with the name of the current road, our heading, the mileage until the next turn, the mileage left in the trip, and the estimated time that it would take us to arrive. It occasionally flipped to a list of directions instead of the map, but returned to the map quickly. Along the way we were able to change the color of the map or between a male and female voice for the voice prompts.

The chime that let us know exactly when it was time to turn was deadly accurate, and the RoadMate even gave us the option of seeing alternate roads that we could take to avoid traffic by zooming in on other parts of the map.

About 100 miles out of Cooperstown, we say a sign that said "Baseball Hall of Fame, next right." The Magellan did not to tell us to get off of the road, yet the signs, and the directions that DC downloaded on the Hall of Fame Web site did. We stayed on the road, like the RoadMate instructed us, about 40 miles later we saw another sign for Cooperstown. Faith in the unit was restored.

We missed the exit to go to our hotel because we had the stereo playing loudly and did not hear the instruction. We had the volume all the way up (on the unit, not the stereo) yet we still missed the command. I understand that on a unit such as this there is not going to be a stereo cut off, but the maximum volume of the unit needs to be louder than it is. That is my one complaint about the RoadMate, which other than that, performed flawlessly.

The unit recalculated the route, and we got to the hotel without further problems at 11:27 p.m.

The next day we used the Point of Interest feature to find the Hall of Fame. We had to type National Baseball Hall of Fame, not just Baseball Hall of Fame, but once we figured that out, the unit was able to guide us there without a problem. As we approached the Hall, the unit went into a super-zoom mode, with the turns clearly highlighted.