cowboyshootist

Once again I'll throw out the Magellan Crossover as the best choice for an all-in-one unit. It's not the best in class but it does have 3 separate nav modes. Vehicle, Outdoor and Marine. The Vehicle nave will do all the things you asked for. The Outdoor mode can be used for Geocaching but you will need paper (or PDA or something) to bring along the notes and hints you can get off the Geocaching site. If you get a chance to look at one in the store keep in mind that there is a firmware update that makes the Vehicle nav more similar to the current Maestro units so you may want to look at one of those to get a better feel for the Vehicle portion. The Outdoor and Marine sections have not been updated yet but I have been told that there is an update coming in March. PS - you can get one from Costco for $229 and they have a 90 day return policy.

In all fairness you can't always judge a book by its cover. Most GPS forum discussions are very Garmin centric and you would expect the "fan-boys" to praise their favorite team, so to speak. Likewise more people that have a pleasant experience don't post while people that have bad experiences do post to vent their frustration. What we don't see here are all the positive Magellan experiences. Are they out there? That's hard to say conclusively. Clearly Magellan has stubbed its toe with respect to customer support. As a side note I find it ironic how people will flame Magellan for the poor quality of the Triton while they will rationalize the poor quality of the Colorado by saying things like "Garmin will fix it..." and so on. At the end of the day the only way to send a message to both of these companies is to stop buying half-baked products until they are fixed. Stick to what is known to work and I think you'll be happier in the long run. Now, back to the Magellan bashing....LOL

When all else fails.....Duct Tape! (it comes in colors now... )

I'll add the Magellan Crossover to the suggested list. This unit has very good vehicle navigation and good "off road" navigation as well. If your geocache is under water it will do marine navigation too. The Crossover is waterproof, has a large screen, runs about 8 hours on batteries comes with a nice car mounting system, takes SD cards and IMHO is about the best multi-purpose unit out there. The form factor is not ideal as it seems more geared towards car use but it's not horrible. If you look at one in a store keep in mind that there is a firmware update that radically changes the vehicle nav and makes it similar to the Maestro units that Magellan is currently selling. I am told there are some additional updates coming in March that will address other aspects of the unit. I think it's the best all-in-one unit on the market. You can get these online from Costco for $229 which is a pretty good deal.

Isn't it great to have 2 companies battling for your gps dollar? I think it keeps them "on their toes" and hopefully that translates into better gear for all of us.

Just wanted to add our thanks as well. Our 210 is now up and running again. I'm a little steamed that all Magellan support could offer us was an upgrade to the Eplorist 500 for our unit and $119.99. You would think they could share this information with their customers! You can get the 500 at Costco for $119. Magellan apparently didn't really offer you anything.

Talk about hijacking a post...LOL As a person that works for a high tech company I have some personal experience with product releases. Every company has a roadmap of features for their product line. In cases like the Colorado all of the intended features may not have been implemented at release. Other products may have a full complement of features at release but the implementation may be buggy and require patches. In the software world you have to differentiate between patches and updates. Patches are generally targeted at fixing functionality that does not work properly. Updates are usually to introduce functionality that was not in the original release. There is sometimes a discussion on whether missing functionality is a bug or a feature but that is another discussion altogether. For the most part companies do not include certain features with the express intent of changing them later on. Or, as the OP suggested, Pre-Plan Updates. Certain features are often omitted intentionally due to resource constraints and the desire to bring a product to market within a given timeframe. Timing is everything when marketing products and there is an old saying that the first company to market gets 50% marketshare by default. Because of this companies work really hard to meet schedules and get the units on the street ahead of the competition. Sometimes the quality of the product suffers because of this. Sometimes testing isn't complete or thorough enough to catch all the problems. Sometimes certain features are enhanced through out the life cycle of the product. For example, the notes feature for geocaches may only allow so many characters at introduction (say 128 characters) and may be upgraded later to accomodate notes of 512 characters. Sometimes these are part of the product roadmap and sometimes they come as suggestions from the user base once the unit is in the field. Most companies want to get it as close to right from the beginning as any rework of the code or patches will cut into the profit margin of the company. Unfortunately there is another saying in the high tech world and that is "We never have time to do it right but we have plenty of time to do it over." Until customers speak with their dollars companies will continue to produce substandard products.

I don't know if I agree with the statement that if it has the features and price then get one. All of these comments are valid including the original poster's. If this unit is advertised as IPX7 then a quick dunk in the water should have no effect. My advice is the opposite. Look at what others are saying and if you see a consistent pattern of poor quality and misrepresentation of advertised features then avoid the product at all cost. Garmin may well indeed work out the kinks, but while they do I will keep my money in the bank rather than letting them have it with no guarantee of making the product work as advertised.

Handspring runs Palm OS. These units have been end of life for some time but they do work well, although they don't always have the latest feature set. They should use the Palm Synch but there's no guarantee they will work with the most current version of that tool. You'll need the cradle for the device and the software to get programs and data onto it. Specifially what do you need?

I believe the Magellan Crossover GPS will do all of the above. I haven't used the track feature so I can't say for sure about that. It will handle Geocaching and Vehicle navigation. It won't do paperless geocaching but it will get you to the cache (and back home).

Have you seen Dash? It should come out soon and will be expensive in the beginning, as most new technologies are. It is a two-way gps in that it talks with wireless internet to get live traffic. While live traffic has been available on some high end GPS's already, this has the additional feature of letting Big Brother Dash know how fast you are driving. If you are stuck in traffic, other Dash users will be directed to avoid the area and vise-versa. I guess some people will have privacy fears (they say the feedback feature is anonymous) but I don't. I usually have a choice of two to four ways of commuting from Rockland, NY to Queens. This would be extremely helpful to me. When you enter the destination you are headed for, it calculates three different routes and depending on how fast traffic is moving, it estimates time for each route. As far as routing and detours go, some communities have been complaining that GPS units have been routing more cars through their neighborhoods. I wish I could cite the source of that tidbit but it was a few weeks ago that I read it. but I guess that could be a real problem if more people are speeding through a residential area because there is traffic on an adjacent highway. A problem to be handled by local enforcement, not GPSr manufacturers. I have seen Dash and it's a great application for mobile wireless data. My question is can Dash produce a quality alternative route? Most of what you would think are mature routing algorithms from Garmin and Magellan just don't seem sophisticated to me. For example. Leaving my house there are (at least) 2 ways to get over to a major E/W road. Both Garmin and Magellan both route me to the first right turn that takes me to that road. There is a second right turn about 1/4 mile away that also takes me directly to that road. There is no speed or distance advantage to taking either road but if you make the first right turn the intersection with the E/W road does not have a traffic signal making it very hard at busy times to make a left turn onto that road. If you take the second right turn the intersection does have a traffic light which is triggered by cars trying to access the E/W road. If nothing else it might be nice to have the GPS "learn" my preferences over time and stop recommending routes that I never take. There are lots of other examples but waht concerns me most is that the quality of new products seems to be declining not improving. Most of the discussion groups tend to be somewhat pro-Garmin and there is certainly lots of bashing of the problems with the Magellan Triton. Enter the Colorado and suddenly we have a nearly identical situation in that neither of those products should have been brought to market yet. The Triton seems to have been pulled, at least temporarily and now appears to be coming back. Everyone seems to be hanging on to the hopes of new firmware releases for the Colorado which I am sure will fix some if not all of the issues. Is there no way for these companies to do more functionality testing before releasing them to the public? Anyway let's hope all of these manufacturers can get it together and put some quality products out.

Misses the mark? In what way? The only issue I see is the proprietary OS which will make adding 3rd party applications problematic. As to the feature set it seems right on for the business user. They will need to integrate with Exchange email and calendar functions otherwise the business world will reject it. I couldn't find any specific information on the email capabilities.

Don't get started or soon we'll be talking about "Party Line" and hand crank telephones...LOL

Greetings, I have been interestedin GPS devices for a few years now. Way back when I picked up one of the RadioShack devices to attach to my Palm PDA for under $100. This device actually worked reasonable well and coupled with Delorme maps on the Palm did a decent job. Eventually I moved off the Palm and have been looking at both handheld and automotive devices. I finally broke down this year and bought a Garmin Nuvi 650 and a Magellan Crossover. I returned the Garmin because it did not have all the features I wanted although it did a great job og routing me from point a to point b. I am currently using the Crossover but am thinking of returning it for one of Magellan's automotive only units (4250). What I have noticed in my first forray into actually owning a GPS is that while certain things seem to be improving (SIRF III chipsets, new maps, etc) others do not. Both the Garmin and Magellan produce "good" routes most of the time but neither of them produce "great" routes. In both cases they tend to keep you on major roads even when taking a "back road" would be faster and more appropriate. The algorithms seem to be pretty basic, IMHO. They seem to only look at distance and speed limit when calculating best routes. In some cases this has resulted in "zig-zag" routes through city neighborhoods when staying on a main thoroughfare would have made more sense (and would have been faster). I even had a situation recently where the GPS said it could not calculate a route even though the destination I was looking for was no more than 3 miles away in downtown Seattle! Furthermore, looking at this group and other GPS related discussion boards tells me that the new products like the Tritons and the Colorados have even more problems! What's up with this? Has the GPS market gotten to the point that the commodity pricing of these units is forcing manufacturers to cut too many corners? We've all heard the Magellan support horror stories. We've also seen Garmin putting out products that are simply not ready for prime time. You would think that the technology for GPS devices would be maturing and that the software to drive them would be getting more sophisticated. Even the quality and accuracy of the maps is not getting that much better. The Crossover is a perfect example of that. Even though I did a firmware update the maps on the Crossover are approximately 3-4 years behind even though Magellan has newer maps on devices like the 4250. You know if Television technology followed this same path we'd still have rabbit ear antennae and tuning knobs that you have to turn by hand. (For you young guys out there this is how TVs used to be back in the 60s).

Not true. SOX covers mostly how your report the financial condition of the company. If company employees couldn't talk to the general public how would they ever sell a product? I go out every day and "hype" my company and product to potential customers. It's called selling. In case you're interested (or bored) take a look at this LINK for more details on SOX.

Another option might be to look at the Magellan Explorist. Costco has the 500 on sale for $119. It would certainly be a much lower cost way to introduce yourself to GPS and geocacheing. Then when Magellan and Garmin get the bugs worked out of the Triton and Colorado you can upgrade and not feel too bad about spending $100 on the Explorist.

And the Colorado is a shining example of why you should run out and drop $500 on a Garmin handheld. $75 for a Magellan 500 is not a bad deal. Costco has them new for $119 so as long as the unit is in good shape I'd say go for it.

If you want simple Route from A to B, get a Garmin Nuvi 200W. It will get you there and back. With respect to Magellan units, you could download Geocache coordinates and covert them for use on the 4250. I have a Crossover and simply convert the .loc files from Geocacheing.com into .wpt files using GPSBabel. Works great. One problem is that if you convert them into Waypoints you cannot easily add them to a Trip. They must be POIs and there is a way to convert the .loc files into POI files as well. On the other hand, the Crossover will give you pretty much the same Vehicle routing as the 4250 (but with older maps) and will give you an Outdoor nav mode that has Topo maps installed. The Crossover is far from perfect but it's about the best multi-purpose unit out there. The Vehicle Nav is about as good as the Garmin Nuvis I tried and the Outdoor Nav is far superior to what you can get on most Automotive navigation systems (but perhaps not nearly as good for Geocaching as other Garmin/Magellan units). My complaints on the Crossover are mostly that I wished Magellan would provide the same updated maps as come on the 4250 and also provide the AAA POI database as well. Everything else I can live with for now although there is plenty of room for improvement.

Costco has had the Crossover for $229 since before Christmas. And, if you don't like it you can return it to Costco for a full refund. Not a bad deal really.

Not necessarily. It would depend on the quality of maps loaded into the handheld. There are several models that include decent Topo maps and I would probably go for one of those. The Etrex and the Garmin 60C would be good places to start. You might also look at the Magelln Explorist or Triton handhelds as another option.

I suspect that it is not the accuracy of the gps but rather the accuracy of the maps on the Nuvi. First off, the Nuvi doesn't have ToPo maps so the level of detail is going to be less when you're off-road. If you're trying to route to the cache with the Nuvi you probably need to select Off-Road instead of Vehicle navigation as I believe that with Vehicle navigation it will lock you onto the nearest road. The other thing you have to remember is that geocache locations are not always 100% accurate as people sometimes do move the cache around, even slightly.

Anyone know what the max number of waypoints for the Magellan Crossover? I have a UPT file with approximately 189 WP but only the first 20 are visible on the Magellan? Is that it, 20 total WP? OK I hate it when I answer my own posts. For some reason when I tried to import the new UPT file the Magellan imported the old file. What's especially strange about that is the old file was deleted from the SD card so I don't know what it was importing. Once I pulled and reinserted the SD card it took all 189 WP from the new file. I found that GSAK and GPSBabel produced different results when converting the LOC file to a UPT. GPSBabel propogated the Geocacheing name as GCxxx whereas GSAK used the first 10 letters of the description field.

Actually, I was incorrect. You can see the waypoints in the Vehicle Nav mode. I found this today when you go into Enter Address -->My Addresses -->Adress Book -->List Waypoints. When you select a Waypoint from the list it gives you the option to route it. So you only need the single file and you don't have to add to Faves.

This is not accurate. First when importing Waypoints into the Outdoor Navigation they will not be available for routing in Vehicle Nav mode. Second, you do not have to add them to your Favorites in Vehicle Nav mode to be able to route to them. I imported them using the POI software that came with the unit and am able to view them from the POI menu as Enhanced POIs. I can select one and route to it without adding it to my Favorites. Outdoor waypoints and Vehicle POIs are different files and don't seem to have any relationship to each other.

Most current GPS units, including my Magellan Crossover, will "lock-on" to the road even though the actual position as determined by the unit may not coincide with the map graphic. Some of them have an option turn that off so that you can see a more "true" position. I am sure we can find all sorts of horror stories for Magellan as well as Garmin. I think they both make good units and since many of the newer units are based on mobile OS platforms you're bound to see some bugs in the initial releases. This is why both Magellan and Garmin release firmware updates for their units. It's nice to have choices....