cowboyshootist

I think the Magellan auto navigation units are a great bargin. For less money you get more features. I know Magellan support has been an issue so take that into consideration. I just bought and returned a Garmin 650 and kept my Magellan Crossover. The Auto nav in the Crossover was superior to the Garmin in many ways. I read through all the reviews and frankly I think many of the reviews are less than accurate with regards to the routing engine on the Magellan. In my (limited) testing the Magellan produced the same routes as the Garmin 99% of the time. The one or two times it offered something different there was no real difference between the routes in terms of miles traveled or time to arrive at destination. The Crossover was $70 cheaper and had features like multi-destination trips, Exit POIs and the ability to display POI icons on the map screen. I also found the Magellan to be slightly less "chatty" than the Garmin which was nice once you get over the novelty of a talking GPS The Crossover also has the ability to navigate off-road (really off-road)and on water unlike the Garmin. Plus it's water resistant and that's a big plus up here in the North West. Garmin certainly makes good products and they seem to be the darling of the Internet and print media. I think if Magellan can get their support organization up to par they could by-pass Garmin as they seem to be leading Garmin with more and better features at a lower price point.

You may want to look at the Magellan Triton. Costco has the 500 offered at $150. Seems like a good deal, if and when they actually get them in stock. Garmin has some new models coming out but I suspect that they will be pricey at fist.

I don't use the PC based tools but I do have a Garmin 650 and a Magellan Crossover. For Vehicle Navigation I'd say that they are pretty much on par with one another. The Magellan has more options for routing and detours and it cost $70 less than the 650. If you're looking for a good Vehicle Nav unit the Crossover will get the job done and then some. (As will the Nuvi 650). The Crossover has the advantage of having Marine and Outdoor navigation capability as well. I don't have a Garmin unit that can do "off-road" navigation so I can't compare but the Crossover seems to be OK, not great and not crappy, just OK. The form factor is really setup for automotive use but it's not horrible as a handheld unit. If you're looking for a "one size fits all" then I think the Crossover deserves a look.

Greetings, I just tried to download and install MapSend Manager from the Magellan site. The file would not unzip and any attempts to run the file from the compressed folder failed. Any ideas as to what might be going wrong? Thanks in advance TC

I have a Garmin Nuvi 650, Costco $299. It can naviagate to coordinates but it is Road navigation and as such only gets you close to the cache if the cache is off-road. I also have a Magellan Crossover unit which does Vehicle, Marine and Outdoor navigation (I wonder who drives their car or boat indoors ) I haven't worked out all kinks on loading geocache data but it does appear to be doable. From there you can Auto navigate to get close and then Outdoor navigate to the cache. The Crossover was $229 at Costco as well. The most recent firmware update puts the Vehicle navigation on par with the Garmins, IMHO. The Outdoor and Marine navigation still need to be updated but it appears they can do that separately. Cheers TC

Greetings, I have a new Maagellan Crossover GPS and am trying to figure out a way to load waypoints without using an SD card. The unit came with some software that will load POI files but does not seem to accept wpt files. I have downloaded geocaching info from geocaching.com and have converted it into a waypoint file (.wpt). Anyone know of a way to load this onto the unit? I have tried MapSend Lite but that doesn't seem to be up to the task. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks TC

I haven't read the actual text of the policy, however, my first hand experience with NewEgg is that they have always stood behind the products they sell and have a generous return policy. For example, I purchased a CPU upgrade from the a couple of years ago. I ordered the wrong version of the processor opened the box, installed it into my PC only to discover that it would not work with my machine. Completely my fault. I called NewEgg and they had me return it and got me the correct part. My cost was an additional $15. Had I bought that from other places I would have had to eat a $250 CPU that I couldn't use. I love how people are crucifying NewEgg based on one story from one customer. Not to dispute the veracity of the original poster but we only have her side of the story and even she claimed that she had not had problems with NewEgg in the past.

I'm not sure the math is completely right in that statement. Outsourcing savings do compare to lost earnings. That's why companies outsource. They've done the math. They know customers who have to deal with outsourcing are unhappy, but they're willing to take the trade-off. If I had to guess, I would say that the average Indian phone rep earns 60%-70% less than their American counterparts. The difference is probably even greater if you figure total benefits package (FICA/health insurance). There are probably dozens of "never another Magellan for me" posts on the Groundspeak boards. There would probably still be some complaints even if customer service was domestic. Even if a die-hard cacher never bought another Magellan for the rest of his life, how many would that be? Four GPSrs? Five? Multiply that by the number of "Never again Magellan" users (hundreds?). outsourcing savings = $ millions ; loss of customers = $ hundreds of thousands? Not to hijack this post but... While outsourcing may save millions this is a cost savings which means Magellan is no longing spending money on employing CS people. By losing sales they are losing revenue and that is what most companies run off of. Magellan is run by a private equity firm which probably means that they don't have a large bank account to draw from. This means that they fund the company from revenue so the loss of customers will kill the company faster than the cost savings from outsourcing can save them. I think losing customers is financially more devastating to Magellan.

I'm not sure the math is completely right in that statement. Outsourcing savings do compare to lost earnings. That's why companies outsource. They've done the math. They know customers who have to deal with outsourcing are unhappy, but they're willing to take the trade-off. If I had to guess, I would say that the average Indian phone rep earns 60%-70% less than their American counterparts. The difference is probably even greater if you figure total benefits package (FICA/health insurance). There are probably dozens of "never another Magellan for me" posts on the Groundspeak boards. There would probably still be some complaints even if customer service was domestic. Even if a die-hard cacher never bought another Magellan for the rest of his life, how many would that be? Four GPSrs? Five? Multiply that by the number of "Never again Magellan" users (hundreds?). outsourcing savings = $ millions ; loss of customers = $ hundreds of thousands? Not to hijack this post but... While outsourcing may save millions this is a cost savings which means Magellan is no longing spending money on employing CS people. By losing sales they are losing revenue and that is what most companies run off of. Magellan is run by a private equity firm which probably means that they don't have a large bank account to draw from. This means that they fund the company from revenue so the loss of customers will kill the company faster than the cost savings from outsourcing can save them. I think losing customers is financially more devastating to Magellan.