Garmin or Magellan

[+naj2000us]

Okay.. really.. what's better. A garmin or magellan? Are they pound for pound just the same? Just a matter of preference, like ford or chevy, nike or adidas? Or is there factual basis on why ones better thant the other?

[CacheNCarryMA]

A few years back, people used to say that Magellans had better satellite reception than Garmins. Now, I think the perception is they're about the same in terms of performance, pound for pound (if you don't count Magellan Triton).

 

Most people will say that Garmin is light years ahead of Magellan in customer support.

Edited January 7, 2008 by CacheNCarryMA

[+Evshro & son]

This is an arguement that has been going on for years. I have had my problems with my Magellan, and in my opinion what it comes down to is support. Magellans support has vanished! It is the folks in these forums that have been my tech support. I appreciate it immensely and pay it forward when I can, but I should be able to rely on the company that put the product out there. I am looking at a Garmin now and wonder how their customer service is. I worry because I see posts time and time again that are in regards to Garmin issues...Why?

[+Sparrowhawk]

The debate around Garmin vs. Magellan is now starting to remind me of the "Quark Express vs. InDesign" debate in the world of graphic design.

 

The desktop-publishing-software story is a little different from the GPS situation. For years, Quark was THE program for desktop publishing. Quark Express was one very well engineered product that really did the job.

 

Unfortunately, the bad quality of their customer service became legendary, tech support was even worse.

 

Then Adobe came out with InDesign. Adobe has fantastic customer service by comparison, and was always responsive to their users. InDesign started selling big on the strength of Adobe's customer service, even on their less-than-great early versions. As a result, sales for InDesign went through the roof, while Quark's fortunes started nose-diving.

 

Some desktop-publishers have said: "Quark, Inc. is the best sales department for InDesign that Adobe could ever hope for!" Wow, no kidding. Adobe’s outreach and empathy for designers’ needs definitely seem to far exceed that of Quark's.

 

Turns out that the Quark CEO has even resigned over the issue recently, and the company is trying vainly to recover lost marketing ground that they squandered for years with their bad customer service. Good @#$! luck.

 

So now we have Magellan and their "non-existent customer service" reputation. And we have Garmin's customer responsiveness.

 

This is starting to sound VERY familiar.

 

Today at the Vegas Groundspeak event, I got to meet the lead engineering designer of the Garmin Colorado. He was there to meet and greet geocachers, answer questions and answer them honestly, along with a friendly marketing guy giving out free Garmin geocoins. It turns out that Garmin reached out to Groundspeak first to find out the needs of geocachers first, before starting the design of the Colorado. Real customer outreach happening. I was impressed.

 

Sooo.....

 

I have a question for the higher-ups at Magellan:

"Do you REALLY want your company to be "the best sales department Garmin ever had"?

 

Think about it.

Edited January 7, 2008 by Sparrowhawk

[OntarioNeil]

Okay.. really.. what's better. A garmin or magellan? Are they pound for pound just the same? Just a matter of preference, like ford or chevy, nike or adidas? Or is there factual basis on why ones better thant the other?

 

Please take this with a grain of salt because I am a newb.

 

I got a Magellan 500LE for xmas, which after a few days I returned even after spending money on an extra battery and maps that I cannot return. I then did a little research and picked up a Garmin Vista HCx.

 

I found the Magellan was slow, had terrible battery life (3x AAA vs. 2x AA of the Garmin). I probably would have kept it except for a couple major factors, 1) I could not get my unit to stay connected to my PC through the provided USB cable long enough to transfer anything, transfers were painfully slow, after half a dozen calls to Magellan support I gave up (each time I would go through the menus to get to the correct department, then get a "Please try again later message", 2) free home built topo versions of the government maps of my region are available for the Garmin now, some stuff is in the works for Magellan but it's not their yet.

 

When I opened the box on the 500LE it just had a couple of brief photocopied manuals that didn't even provide instruction on attaching their USB cable, the PDFs provided on disk were not any better. I found the little joystick a bit awkward, it was very easy to miss-click, the Garmin is much more precise feeling, I don't think I've miss-clicked yet (kind of like comparing the rubbery manual shifter on a '84 Ford Escort vs. a fine precise shfter on a BMW M3).

 

I find the Garmin smaller (fits in my cars cellphone holder), lighter, faster, more intuitive, has many more features, it's more customizable and it can even pick up satellites indoors, not a chance with the Magellan. Plus manuals are great, the community is bigger. I bought the Garmin from a small shop locally, they were truly enthusiastic about the product and gave me a great run down of the product before I put my money down (Durham Radio in Whitby) ...they also had the best price out of any of the online retailers here in Canada.

 

The only real pros I could see to the Magellan were the nice file manager interface, much like windows CE, allows flipping throught different types of maps on the unit for the same region, and it _seems_ like it could be a bit more durable than the Garmin based purely on look and feel.

 

the base maps on both units are comparable. I thought I should mention this since their is alot of folks complaining about the base maps particularly on the Magellan on alot of store review sites. They seem pretty close to me, if anything the Magellan are slightly more accureate.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Neil

Edited January 7, 2008 by OntarioNeil

[CassCach]

I had just the opposite problem.

 

I got a Garmin Geko201 for X-mas and had nothing but problems with it. It may have just been the individual unit that I received was bad, but I could never get decent reception on it. I tried for about 3 or 4 days and even in the middle of a football field I was only able get it working once for any length of time.

 

I received lots of good advice from people on this forum and finally decided to take it back. When I did take it back they didn't have the same model and I ended up getting a Magellan eXplorist 210. It has functioned perfectly from the moment I turned it on. I had no trouble at all connecting to the computer and I used the Magellan Cache Manager to upload to the gps with no problem at all.

 

I would suggest you purchase what ever you choose from some place with a good return policy. If you have problems or decide you think something else would be better it's good to be able to take it back with out too much of a hassle.